Gallery

Environmental Restoration by Artists

The March 2008 issue of Ecological Restoration includes an article titled "Called to Action: Environmental Restoration by Artists" by Lillian Ball about works by artists who not only comment upon environmental issues but also intercede to halt degradation and nurture environmental health. Here's a taste of their work:

1) Riverhead Golf Course and Housing, Infrared photograph, 2006

BOB BRAINE AND LESLIE C. REED

THE URSCAPE OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS OR AN INVERTED GOLF COURSE. 2007

The term restoration implies an UR landscape, a pure, ideal landscape. In most people's minds this existed in some nebulous past tense - did our great-grandparents live in this sublime and pristine American landscape? The first colonialists? The Native Americans? This URscape exists for us as an ecosystem that is distinct, indeed separate from human endeavors. The restored landscape only exists in our collective unconscious. Nearly 30,000 years ago humans first came to the Americas. In so doing, they forever and dramatically altered the land. In the landscape of Suffolk County one can read thousands of years of human interaction with the environment. From the spotted knapweed in Art Sites' backyard to the golf courses and sod farms to the North and even the Pine Barrens across the Peconic River, the land is marked by the footprint of man. Restoration can only be a restoration of habitat types that support a genetically diverse gene pool. This may manifest as wetlands,-which are critical in so many ways, providing flood and erosion control and functioning as nursery areas for many species of marine life. Removing this type of biologically diverse ecosystem and replacing it with a monoculture like a golf course, sod farm or lawn-heavy, residential development does even more than reduce the survival prospects of the gene pool of our planet; it also creates a psychological void of sorts. This void is buffered by the interstitial spaces that don't get fully planned-the wooded border around the discarded farming machinery pile, the marshy depressions that form in the leaves of the LIE clovers.

Through doing a series of studies in real space on the grounds of Art Sites, we have decided to create an inverted golf course--a scale model built on the grounds. It will be a planted marshland in the space that would ordinarily be the fairways and greens, and it will be carefully manicured golf course turf on mounds the shape of which will be the inverse of the benthic profile of the water features. These islands are like overturned glacial kettle holes. As we survey the site from the air, the iconic importance of the actual aerial image of a golf course, highway clover leaf or housing development with its circuit board pattern becomes apparent. These are the earth works of our culture and like the Nazca Lines or Serpentine earthen mounds of the middle US, they form familiar terrestrial constellations for the myriad airborne citizens passing over them each year.

Bob Braine: Born in Queens NY 1963. University of Hartford Art School, 1987. Since 1990 Braine has been showing work in the US and Europe. Braine has also traveled extensively in Central and South America, Europe and the US generating photographs, drawings and site specific interventions based on the fractured utopia of compromised ecosystems. Publications include "Two Waters" Published by Salon Verlag in collaboration with The Gallerie Fur Landschaftskunst in Hamburg, Concrete Jungle, Juno Books, New York, and Neotropic, Onestar Press, Paris, France. Writings appear in "Writing on Water" MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Leslie Reed: Born in Baltimore, MD, 1979 She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, receiving her BFA in 2002. In 2006 she received a certificate in Urban Horticulture from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, in Brooklyn, NY. In 2004 Reed was awarded an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park for her work Littoral Resonance, an installation of 50+ cast silicone crabs installed in the East River. Recently Reed, together with her collaborator Bob Braine, received the Generated@WaveHill grant from Wave Hill to produce new work.

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2) Detail photograph of Revival Field Plot Marker No 67, 1991-93

MEL CHIN

REVIVAL FIELD PLOT MARKER NO. 67, 1991-93

Size: H 24" x W 3 3/4" x 1 1/2" D, Materials: redwood, aluminum, bakelite, glass, zinc, copper, lead

The Revival Field Project began as a conceptual artwork with the intent to sculpt a site's ecology using hyperaccumulator plants that can remove heavy metals in concentrations enough to be recycled as ore. Revival Field was active at Pig's Eye Landfill from 1991 to 1993. Scientific analysis of biomass and soil samples from this field confirmed the potential of "Green Remediation." Revival Field, an artwork, catalyzed scientific processes and opened paths of international exchange and awareness in both the scientific and public realms. Its stated goal remains - the transformation of hazardous sites into productive environments.

PLOT MARKER No. 67

The Revival Field stakes were meant to be conceptual comments on the eventual targets that the hyperaccumulators faced and to identify the individual plots in a unique fashion. At the "Superfund" Pig's Eye Site, St. Paul, Minnesota these plot markers were specially constructed out of redwood, aluminum and stainless steel, with the "target" metals within glass. The sealed bottles, which contain zinc, copper and lead, act as real and symbolic antagonists dangling above the hyperaccumulators to challenge their growth and serve as accurate numerical references to the 96 plots. Metal bars and shot inside the bottles are assigned 20-based system denominations: zinc = 20, copper = 5 and lead = 1.

Mel Chin is known for the broad range of approaches in his art, including works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork and works that conjoin cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas. Aside from projects like Revival Field, he has produced projects such as, In the Name of the Place 1995-1998, a conceptual public art project conducted on prime-time television. This work debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, CA, and concluded with an auction at Sotheby's with all proceeds donated to create educational scholarships.

Mel Chin continues to exhibit extensively in the United States and Europe, including one-man exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, the Menil Collection, Houston, TX, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, and the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, PA. His proposal for a New World Trade Center was part of the American representation at the 2002 Venice Biennale of Architecture. His most recent one person exhibition was entitled, "Do Not Ask Me" at the Station Museum in Houston. Named after the poem by Pablo Neruda, the exhibit featured poignant works that bear witness to political tragedy created from 1989 to 2005. He is currently creating an animated film: 9-11/9-11. He is the recipient of many awards and grants including a Cal Arts/Alpert Award, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, a Pollock/Krasner Foundation Fellowship, a Tiffany Foundation Award, a Joan Mitchell Award, an Engelhard Award, a Penny McCall Foundation Award, and several NEA Fellowships. Chin is one of 16 artists included in the PBS Series Art of the 21st Century aired in the Fall of '01.

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3) drawing for an overstory for a neighborhood of trees that would have changed the weather patterns + the way water soaked into the ground

THE HARRISON STUDIO

Helen Mayer Harrison/Newton Harrison and Associates

SANTA FE DRAIN BASIN: LESSIONS FROM THE GENIUS OF PLACE, 2002-2005

We first came to the Santa Fe Art Institute to give a lecture on our work followed by a workshop. We found many people distressed by the destruction of their river, their problems with water and the fact that nothing could get done. Seeing the destruction of the river and being asked by the workshop to "do something," with their help (primarily permaculture people), we first realized that the basic problem was not the water, but the earth, which from generations of over-grazing and misuse had been eroded. Working with Hispanics, Native Americans and Anglos like ourselves, teenagers, engineers and permaculturists, among others, we offered five proposals and six considerations to restore the ability of the soil to retain moisture. Among these proposals were a "genetic diffusion" system to restore life in the arroyos and the regeneration of 7 miles of virtually dead riverbed. "raising the riverbed". Several proposals addressed the urban ecosystem and the dying of the Pinons. These proposals took the form of large and small maps, drawings and texts, a 70-foot long aerial photograph, video stories and an extended sculptural array of Tewa water symbols telling the story of water. Ultimately the Tewa symbols were designed to add sinuosity to the riverbed. The core elements of the work were moved out of the gallery and into the city plan. The river is being raised and the arroyos have begun to be planted.

We have been collaborating on ecological projects since the early 1970's when we began with "The Survival Series," making earth and then portable farms, orchards and fish farms grown indoors under lights, since we felt that farming might well become a survival skill. We have done projects with areas as small as a series of tiny street gardens in Santa Monica for "California Wash: a Memorial". We have had an exhibition in four countries in four languages, sponsored by the European Union, several government agencies and at least four museums, called "Peninsula Europe: Bringing Forth a New State of Mind".

Although we rarely show in galleries, we have been with Ronald Feldman Fine Arts since 1974. Since the mid-eighties we have done much of our work in Europe. We have been in two Sao Paulo Biennals and two Venice Biennales. We were in Documenta 8 and later had a DAAD in Berlin. We have been working on the subject of Global Warming or climate change since 1974 and now have a grant from an agency of the British government for a work called "Greenhouse Britain:Loosing Ground, Gaining Wisdom". Always we begin with "How Big is Here?" and search for visual and verbal visions that will increase the well-being of all living things from the life in the soil to the people who live on it. Most of our projects land on the ground, either with us, or often long after we have gone, done by others.

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4) Yellowboy galvanized steel sandblasted glass, materials from the site; 25" x 25' x 2"

5) Bony galvanized steel sandblasted glass, materials from the site; 25" x 25' x 2"

These plates contain materials of the site, from the black waste material called bony to the sticky iron participate called yellowboy. These materials are all pollutants but their bright colors and contrasts give the site a sublime reality: fearsome yet beautiful- a landscape of toxins and allure.

STACY LEVY and JULIE BARGMANN

AMD&ART PROJECT IN VINTONDALE, PA 2005.

Collaboration with Julie Bargmann, Landscape Architect. Robert Deason, Hydrogeologist and T. Allan Comp Historian

As a sculptor, my interest in the natural world rests both in art and science. I work within the two fields using art as a vehicle for translating the patterns and processes of the natural world into the language of human understanding. I have worked to bring a whole neighborhood of microorganisms into view in a street in Seattle, and to picture the gastronomic activity of the inhabitants of a creek in Philadelphia. I have tracked the direction of the wind, and collected the precipitation every day for six months to create a calendar of rainfall. I have mapped the watersheds of the Delaware River, the Yadkin River and the San Antonio River with water collected from all of the actual tributaries. I have directed storm water runoff to flow through a stone map of the Delaware River so that the water runs down the runnels of each tributary, replicating the flow of the watershed every time it rains. For six years I have been working with a team comprised of a scientist, landscape architect and an historian on AMD and Art Project for Vintondale. Our design brings an obliterated industrial history back to the site, it allows the treatment process to become visible and vibrant, and it creates a park which is accessible and relevant to the community living next door. In my work, I mesh the clarity of diagrams, the beauty of natural forms and the visceral sense of the site. My art creates a comprehensible visual metaphor for an otherwise invisible natural process.

Testing the Waters is a completely new method of designing a passive water treatment solution for acid mine drainage, a nasty cocktail of heavy metals which seeps out of abandoned mines. Rather than a typical engineered solution, in this project we are both treating the water and showing the process. The Litmus Gardens, hedgerows of native trees and shrubs vivify the process of the water treatment, reflecting the color of the water as it progresses throughout the treatment basins from deep orange, to yellow and then to pea green. The design of the water treatment wetlands brings the massive scale of the mining operation back to the site, with raised plinths of soil demarcating the footprints of the original mine buildings. The team has worked closely with the community through a series of neighborhood meetings and field days, planting trees with volunteer groups. Much of the project was built with in-kind services and was made possible by a great effort from Ameri-Corp Volunteers.

Stacy Levy investigates water, clarifying the movement of rain and storm water in the landscape and making visible the patterns of watersheds and flowing water. She has commissions in Seattle, Philadelphia, New Jersey and at the North Carolina Zoo. She recently completed Lotic Meander, a stream terrace at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. She is currently working on a tidal piece on the Hudson River in New York. Stacy has shown at Mass MoCA, Wave Hill, The Hudson River Museum, The Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. She co-created AMD&Art, at Vintondale, a project with Julie Bargmann, T. Allan Comp & Bob Deason. Stacy Levy graduated from Yale University in 1984 with a BA in sculpture and forestry and she received her MFA in 1991 from the Tyler School of Art. Stacy Levy is represented by Larry Becker Contemporary Art in Philadelphia PA.

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6)Riverhead with Ghost Nets, photographic collage, 2006

AVIVA RAHMANI

"TRIGGER POINTS", 1990-2000

drawing/photo work about her 10 year wetland dump restoration in Vinalhaven, Maine and it's relevance to Riverhead

How does Riverhead fit into a larger matrix of circumpolar sites impacted by global warming? How can threatened resources, as water, wetlands and soils, become protected sources of abundance? What if we could identify small places, formerly rich habitat, "hotspots" of biological richness, perhaps wasteland now, whose restoration might catalyze significant regional environmental healing? As any city develops, it has the opportunity to incorporate such modeling into city planning. The thesis of "Cities and Oceans of If," is that often degraded sites can be trigger points of change. Restoring them can effect macro landscape change, acupuncture "trigger points," on the global body.

Ghost Nets, 1990-2000, on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, restored a coastal town dump to a flourishing wetlands. It still teaches me monitoring skills to apply internationally. Might art restore, connect and link key areas, even in urbanized locations, transforming problems into revenue and peace? In these times of environmental challenge, identifying such opportunities is a process of ecological triage, an analytic and observational task: "Environmental triage," my term for salvaging a biological system on the edge of collapse. Now, our whole world is at risk. But each community can participate in a design process with local and global implications.

I am a citizen of a world threatened by global warming. The natural world I respond to as an artist is a dynamic web of systems as much as particular landscapes. Observing the performance of life in flux drives my practice into analysis and experimentation. This is a personal relationship.

Aviva Rahmani's career spans forty years of engagement in social and environmental concerns. Her work has been exhibited in close to one hundred one-person and group shows nationally and internationally and referenced in numerous books and articles. Ecological art installations by Rahmani have been shown at the Hudson River Museum, NY, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, Museo d'Arte Contemporaneo, Seville, Spain. Restoration projects, as Ghost Nets, have been funded by the Nancy H. Gray Foundation for Art in the Environment. A 2002 one-person show at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Camden, Maine was a retrospective of that project. Tuesdays she hosts, "Virtual Concerts," at TalkShoe.com.

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7)May 18, commencing 5:40 AM, from the series Shinnecock, space/time study, 2006, 44" x 210," color pigment print. The white cockerel, Shinnecock, strutting on land formerly known as the 13 acre Estate Gissa Bu, clear cut for the development "Manors of Southampton," recently acquired for the Town of Southampton "open space program," Shinnecock, Southampton.

HOPE SANDROW

SHINNECOCK: MAY 18, COMMENCING 5:40 AM, 2006

The sudden appearance of a white rooster is believed by many to be a sign of good fortune. I have come to believe this, too. While walking one morning on Shinnecock Hills once painted by William Merrit Chase, my path crossed with a white cockerel. He followed me home, and chose a cedar tree at the entrance to my garden for his roost. Hearing his cock-a-doodle-doo at dawn, I awoke, and followed, taking photographs.

May 18, commencing 5:40 AM is part of the series Shinnecock and study spacetime that documents the life and times of the white cockerel I've named Shinnecock, after the area where I encountered him. He is a member of the endangered ancient breed of Paduan Fowls painted by 16th Century Italian artists and noted by naturalists such as Charles Darwin. My adventures with the cockerel led me to a 13 acre estate that Shinnecock Indian Nation believes is the site of sacred Indian burials. Two days earlier this land was clear-cut of trees and plants for development, its Manor slated for demolition.

I have since made a concerted effort, with the Shinnecock Nation, one of the oldest continuously self-governing Native American tribes in the country, to preserve this 13 acre estate from future development. The New York State Preservation League designated it one of seven most threatened historic resources. In addition to the remarkable building designed by Norwegian architect Thorbjorn Bassoe, the property is also valuable for its uses related to the area's maritime industry and the Shinnecock Nation.

And for the cockerel Shinnecock, I brought home hens.

Hope Sandrow's work has recently been shown at PS1 (LI City, NY), the Southampton Historical Museum (Southampton, NY), the Contemporary Museum (Baltimore); Nasher Museum of Art (Duke University); and New Museum (New York). Sandrow's work is included in public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Her work has received numerous awards including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and the Skowhegan Governors Award. Sandrow lives and works in Manhattan and Shinnecock Hills, New York.

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