The symposium will conclude with a panel discussion among the artists regarding the potential impact ecoart can have in Martin County.
To REGISTER for the Symposium, CLICK HERE. All other events are free.
Following the symposium will be opening receptions for two simultaneous exhibitions of ecoart practitioners’ work at the Stuart Court House Cultural Center.
For information and directions, log onto the Arts Council Website
1) in one of the two exhibition galleries in the Courthouse, an installation of mangrove propagules (and video documentation of the first of several Reclamation Projects) that is part of Xavier Cortada’s Martin County rendition of his Reclamation Project together with Cortada’s companion ecoart project emphasizing land based urban reforestation with native Florida trees outside in the park next to the Courthouse cultural center;
2) “EPA: Environmental Performance Art” borrowed from the New York City gallery Exit Art. Eight of the more than 30 artists included in Exit Art’s 2008 EPA show (curated by Patricia Watts and Amy Lipton), graphical information on each as well as descriptions of their performances are featured.
The exhibitions will be open to the public from April 2-May 9, 2008.
Background on Selected Artists from EPA (Exit Art’s “Environmental Performance Art” 2008 exhibition--curated by Amy Lipton and Patricia Watts) in Ecoart Exhibition, Martin County, April 2-May 9, 2009
Brandon Ballengée
In what he calls “Eco-actions”, the artist invites the public to participate in scientific field-research. “As an artist and activist, I believe the first step to environmental and social change is interaction. By participating as a biologist and inviting the public, I confront people with the ecology of their backyard. Sometimes we find healthy species in functioning wetlands. Other times the investigations uncover the effects of degradation. Like the site in England, on the surface a scenic residential garden pond, a fabricated vision of tranquility, yet containing monstrous environmentally sculpted creatures. The experience is emotionally complex, often uncanny, and hopefully changes people. These dual art and biology projects are my attempt at sculpting society.”
Ballengée has been recently in residence with the Malamp UK Project, and has collaborated with Dr. Stanley Sessions at the Biology Department of Hartwick College, NY to chemically ‘clear and stain’ the specimens which illuminates the structure and complexity of each malformation. Currently the artist is working with the Société des Arts Technologiques, Montreal to experimentally scan each specimen for the creation of a new series of scanner photographs and further scientific analysis.
Futurefarmers: Amy Franceschini, Jonathan Meuser, Stijn Schiffeleers, and Michael Swaine
Futurefarmers is a group of practitioners aligned through an open practice of making socially relevant work. Founded in 1995 by Amy Franceschini, the Futurefarmers are interested in the multidisciplinary arenas of art, architecture, design, technology, science, and sustainable environments. Comfortable in both traditional and new media, the Futurefarmers employ a fertile approach to every project, and through many collaborations, explore the relationship of concept and creative processes. Amy Franceschini is an artist and educator. She founded Futurefarmers in 1995, as a means to bring together multidisciplinary practitioners to create new work. In 2002, she founded Free-Soil She is currently teaching Media Theory and Practice courses at Stanford University and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Project Description
A small tent was placed in a public park opposite the Boulder Museum in Boulder, Colorado. For two days scientists from the National Renewable Energy Labs offered their time to informally discuss their research and current energy concerns. The tent and ensuing discussions were open to any visitor that showed an interest.
After the first day of meetings, Futurefarmers found a common thread of conversation that led to a fairytale framework for their future dialogue. When a new group came together in the tent, they were asked to consider the story of the Three Little Pigs under the thematic umbrella of energy. The tent provided an opportunity for dynamic discussions, combining professional research with the ideas of non-scientists.
Fritz Haeg -- Edible Estates
Like a system of crop rotation, Fritz Haeg works between his architecture and design practice, Fritz Haeg Studio, the happenings and gatherings of Sundown Salon, the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab, and his role as an educator. After studying at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and Carnegie Mellon, Haeg taught at CalArts, Art Center College of Design, Parsons, and the University of Southern California. His first book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, outlines his artistic philosophy and was published by Metropolis Books in February 2008.
Project Description
The Edible Estates project began as a part of GardenLab, a program which was established by artist Fritz Haeg in 2001. GardenLab uses the garden as a metaphor and a laboratory for ecology based initiatives in art and design. Edible Estates emerged in 2005 as a project to replace American front lawns with edible landscapes that respond to specific cultures, climates, and people. Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #2, Lakewood, CA was created at the Foti family’s home in Lakewood, a 1950s housing development with typical suburban front lawns. The Lakewood Edible Estate helped the Foti Family turn their front lawn into a place for gardening and a site for experimentation. Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #4, London, UK was commissioned by the Tate Modern museum. The artist worked with families of the Southwark neighborhood of London to convert the public lawn in front of their housing estate into a garden for food production. Edible Estates attacks the concept of the American lawn and attempts to reconcile the issues of global food production and urbanized land use through the domestic garden. Haeg views the project as a practical food producing initiative, a landscape design proposal which responds to each specific environmental context, a scientific horticultural experiment, a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political statement, a community out-reach program, and an act of radical gardening.
Carolyn Lambert --The Ohio River Lifeboat Project
Carolyn Lambert’s work unravels social histories by playing, re-enacting, and re-narrating these pieces in the public sphere. Often collaborative, and always participatory, Lambert’s projects are grounded in a dialogue based research practice. Prioritizing experiences over objects, Lambert seeks to expand the bounds of relational practices, performance art, social sculpture, and documentary.
Lambert is particularly interested in the reciprocal ways that people and environments shape each other. She is drawn to places of historical tension, and the compelling challenges they contain. She explores sites through planned actions, dialogues, and/or performances, and names the process of revealing these stories, as the goal of her practice.
Deeply inspired by the actions, happenings, and life-art of the late sixties and early seventies, she employs a more contemporary approach to destabilize the relationship between artist and audience. “Co-creation with audience participants” says Lambert “pushes the role of art in society from embellishment and inspiration, to that of action and mobilization.”
Project Description
The Ohio River Lifeboat Project was a three-and-a-half month journey that explored and documented contemporary life on the Ohio River. This experiment-in-living included a series of gatherings, recorded interviews and regular updates to the project website. The river, a communal place with many stakeholders, was the site and subject; the interaction was the artwork. An eco-customized, collaboratively built, pontoon houseboat carried a two-person crew down the river and functioned as a sleeping, cooking and storage space. The boat was both a mode of transportation, which offered access to banks, islands and tributaries, and a means to fully integrate into river life and culture. A solar panel, water filtration system (to make river water potable), a grey water catchment system, and a small herb garden made the Lifeboat an example of sustainable water living.
The Lifeboat hosted potluck dinners as forums for discussing the intersections of recreation and commerce, culture and ecology on the Ohio River. The artist swapped stories with towboat captains, swimmers, casino boat pilots, commercial fishermen, power plant chemists, environmental activists, small business owners, historians and museum docents. Drawing on their personal stories and memories, Lambert initiated discussions of the river as a shared space.
The Ohio River represents a thoroughfare, a natural resource, a respite and source of recreation. Beginning in Pittsburgh, the Ohio flows through six states – Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. The river is a drinking source for more than three million people. Nine percent of total US energy from coal comes from plants directly on the Ohio River. Over 230 million tons of cargo is transported on its waters each year.
Kathryn Miller--Seed Bomb
Kathryn Miller a visual artist whose work is deeply rooted in environmental issues, concepts, questions, and concerns. As a keen observer of the natural world, Miller chose to pursue an undergraduate degree in biology in an effort to better understand these complex interactions. From biology she turned to ecology, botany, soil science, and later art.
By combining these disciplines she has been able to follow a mutually compatible scientific and artistic direction in her own work. She actively collaborates with other artists and scientists to explore new and more informed perspectives.
She is now a professor of art with an interdisciplinary emphasis in environmental studies at Pitzer College. Through education she hopes to inform and broaden the ways in which we view and perceive nature and native habitats.
Project Description
Seed Bomb was a project that dispersed snowball-sized clusters of dirt and native plants throughout the Santa Barbara area of California. In an effort to help repopulate the landscape with vegetation after a significant drought, Miller turned to this non-violent form of environmental aggression. The clusters were made from fertile soil, seeds and dextrin, a cornstarch derivative often used as a binder in candy bars and cattle feed.
In the early 1990s, Santa Barbara, California went through an intense five-year drought. Wildfires broke out and destroyed homes, businesses and many of the non-native, water dependant plants. Seed Bomb was an attempt to create artwork that would celebrate the beauty and importance of the land as well as rejuvenate and work within its natural systems. Once the drought broke, the “bombs” were realized and released, spreading new, self-sustaining growth in the barren areas.
Carissa Carman/Joanna Lake--State of Progress
The Goal of State of Progress http://www.stateofprogress.org :To tour the rural and urban routes of the United States in 2007 researching and collecting images, eating locally, driving sustainably and allowing for creative time to design interactive installations that will prompt inquiry and interest to create slow food communities.
Project Summary
State of Progress was a multi-disciplinary traveling art project touring American farms and fairs facilitating interactive installations with the general public and agricultural communities. Carissa and Joanna went on a ten week tour of the United States traveling in a vehicle powered by waste vegetable oil (WVO) to explore American methods, responses and perceptions of creating sustainable and healthy agriculture. The tour included stops along the way at a variety of farms and agricultural producers to learn from the diversity of farming methods and alternatives used in the United States.
Installing the interactive Traveling Photo Booth was a venue for artistic play, prompting ideas on farming techniques, sustainable options and innovative alternatives. Outfitted with costumes, backdrops, props and phrase cards created by Carissa and Joanna from foraged and found items, people staged their own scene on American farming. Photo Booth participants got their picture taken, which was then catalogued in our online archive.
Temescal Amity Works (Susanne Cockrell/Ted Purves)
Temescal Amity Works was a multi-year project (July 2004-January 2007) sited in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland, California. We have lived in the neighborhood since 1999, and when we conceived of the project, we saw it as a way to localize our attention and to restructure our practice to work in a community that we were not external to. We considered the project to be a social sculpture that also drew upon historical models of mutual-aid societies, barn-raisings, DIY collectives and urban communism. We were (and still are) interested in how a specific community built relationships through personal and casual economies. To accomplish this, we created two interlocking programs, The Big Back Yard and Reading Room.
The Big Back Yard built on the history of the neighborhood as an Italian-American, immigrant community that was planted with citrus and fruit trees. Today, these trees still bear fruit while the culture that planted them has dwindled. Much of the harvest rots on the ground or is hauled away by the city. The Big Backyard was based around a hand-built, steel pushcart that we made to collect surplus fruits and vegetables from neighborhood yards, which we gave away fresh or re-distributed in the forms of collective marmalades and fruit butters.
The Reading Room, located at a storefront space just off Telegraph Avenue, contextualized the ongoing experience of the Big Backyard through casual contact during open hours, as well as through a series of public events, film screenings and a small resource library. We also invited local artists, historians and others to create projects that overlaid themselves onto Temescal Amity Works in a productive and complicated way, making available our space and resources, including modest re-distributions of our funding. These collaborations included a Yellow Car Parade, a seed-exchange board, a marathon bread-baking workshop and a Broom Mending walk.
Over the course of the project, our storefront was open most weekends. We harvested and redistributed thousands of free oranges, lemons, apples, and other produce from local yards. We made and gave away many jars of marmalade, fig conserve and apple butter.
Ozzie Forbes--Rio Indio Project
Ozzie Forbes worked in collaboration with a Puerto Rican environmental organization and a team of volunteers for three years to clean up the notoriously trashed Rio Indio which had become a receptacle for all manner of detritus from cars and mattresses to tons of plastic and scrap metal. This video tells the story of this effort.
II. Film/Video Series
April 3-5, 2009
Purpose: The film and video series will amplify the understanding of ecoart begun in the 1st phase--symposium and exhibitions--by providing Martin County audiences an opportunity to learn about several additional forms of ecoart practice.
Description: A total of 9 films will be shown. two films will be shown together at each of 4 times: Friday evening, April 3rd, Saturday afternoon and evening, April 4th and Sunday afternoon, April 5th. In each set of two the first shown will be a documentary treatment of how a particular environmental problem or issue is affecting local populations outside the US. The second of the two will trace the contours of an ecoartist’s work that addresses the issue. After each set of two films are shown, there will be a panel of local environmental and cultural leaders who will react to the films and engage the audience in a guided discussion, facilitated by various representatives of the collaborating organizations.
The film showings on Friday and Saturday will be at The Elliott Museum, Hutchinson Island. The films shown on Sunday afternoon will be at the Blake Library, Stuart.
For detailed information and directions, log on to the Arts Council website.
Friday afternoon, April 3, 2-4 PM: “The Indian River Lagoon: Gateway to Saving the Everglades.” A 2006 documentary produced by the Community Foundation of Palm Beach and Martin Counties.
"The Reclamation Project" a short documentary tracing the origin and first fielding of Xavier Cortada's imaginative reforestation of mangroves in Biscayne Bay.
Friday evening, April 3, 6-8 PM:-“Ganga from the Ground Up” is about India’s most sacred river and the assaults on it by privatization, dam building and pollution.
Paired with ecoartist Basia Irland’s “A Gathering of Waters: The Rio Grande, Source to Sea.” The Gathering project, begun in 1995, was conceived as a symbolic carrying of Rio Grande/Rio Bravo's waters from source to sea, to re-establish people's connection with the river and with each other along its 1,875 mile length. A special canteen, called the River Vessel, was passed downstream, from community to community, from hand-to-hand and by foot and various kinds of vehicles, including a hot air balloon.
Saturday, April 4th, afternoon, 2-4 PM:-“Nor Any Drop to Drink—Palestine” Traces the impact of water shortages on the lives of Palestinians in the Israel-Occupied Territories.
Paired with Israeli ecoartist Shai Zakai’s “Concrete Creek” -- documentation of an artwork that “saved” a creek near her home. The creek had been used for years as a dump area for concrete from workmen at the end of days of construction.
Saturday, April 4th, evening 6-8 PM:-“Croaking Frogs: Before it’s too late” addresses the biggest mass extinction since the demise of the dinosaur and scientists’ attempts to save one of the oldest species on the planet.
Paired with Brandon Ballengee’s “Malamp Amphibian Deformity Project.” Brandon Ballengée's work bridges the gap between biology and art. He combines a fascination with amphibians, fish and insects with techniques of fine art imaging. For the past ten years, Ballengée's primary field of study has been amphibian declines and deformities. During an artist residency in the UK in 2007 and 2008, artist Ballengée led a study into declining amphibian species, through participatory lab and field-based research investigations, working with the public as well as collaborating scientists.
Sunday afternoon, April 5th 2-4 PM:-“Water and Autonomy” looks at the lack of access to potable water for indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico and how the Zapatista communities are addressing it through grass roots organizing and training.
Paired with “Desert Rainwater Harvesting,” a collaboration between artists Basia Irland and Beverly Singer with the Pueblo de Isleta native American community in New Mexico. The work is interdisciplinary and intergenerational in scope with involvement of traditional tribal elders, community members, youth, elementary school teachers, University of New Mexico graduate students and professors, as well as film makers and artists. The project utilizes simple methods to catch rainwater on rooftops and divert it to Xeriscape gardens. The gardens feature indigenous plants traditionally used by Native and Hispano peoples, with interpretive signage to explain the plants. Hand-made terra-cotta pots, called Ollas, are buried in the ground to catch rainwater and "sweat" this moisture to plant roots. Ceramic tiles, placed on the front columns of the Recreation Center, list tribal words for water.
III. Ecoart Workshop for Martin County Resident Professional Artists
Purpose: This one day workshop will introduce a selected group of Martin County professional artists to ecoart practice and serve as a screening opportunity for selecting the final group of apprentice ecoartists who will work with mentor artist Betsy Damon.
Description: Martin County resident professional artists will be encouraged through various means to apply to attend this workshop which will occur in early June. To apply, each artist must write a one page essay describing why they would like to consider ecoart as a new creative direction, provide two letters of recommendation from community organizations or environmental groups with which they have been collaboratively active and provide a cd of images of recent work.
The workshop itself will be designed to observe the participants in structured situational exercises designed to assess how quickly and creatively they respond to various challenges similar to the ones found in development and creation of ecoart projects, and what kinds of aesthetic methodologies they decide to use to address problems as well as how effectively they work in concert with the other artists, and how familiar they are with Martin County community resources that can be brought to bear. The workshop will be facilitated, and there will be several observers present who will be noting the performances of the participants. Betsy Damon, the experienced ecoartist who will mentor the ecoart apprentices will do some facilitating, but will primarily be observing.
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