Art That Matters to the Planet: Interconnectivity, Roger Tory Peterson Institute-closing Oct. 8
untitled 5 + 62015
59″ W x 89″HCurated by Maria Ferguson
Inspired by the emerging science and insights of Suzanne Simard (Finding the Mother Tree) and Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees), Art that Matters to the Planet 2023: Interconnectivity, explores the underground network of tree roots, and how communication and nutrient sharing helps trees to thrive. Highlighting the connectivity of trees serves as an analogy for interconnected relationships in creating strong communities. With anthropomorphic roots, paintings of lively underground societies, and reflections on the important role of trees in our lives, the exhibition will encourage us to discover connections between our own relationships and those within the natural world.
Artists featured in this exhibit include: George Lorio, Jack Elliott , Brendan Quirk, Sallie Lowenstein, Pamela Casper, Kelsey Gilmore, Gayle Fichtinger, Cynthia Martinez, Susan Martin Maffei, Margaret LeJeune, Michele Brody, Ian Campbell, elin slavick, Ellen Driscoll, Laura Ahola-Young, Pamela Sloan, Meredith Nemirov, Neshama Roash, Audrey Dowling, Wendy Bale, Noah DiRuzza, Cyrena Nouzille, Trine Bumiller, Bette Kauffman, Kaycee Colburn.
Healthy tree cover creates many important benefits for cities, including cooler temperatures, cleaner air, higher property values, and healthier residents. For the past 42 years, Jamestown’s commitment to maintaining the city’s tree cover has been recognized by the Arbor Day Foundation through designation as a Tree City USA. This demonstrates the city’s commitment to growing and tending to these valuable public assets, and prioritizing the long-term health of the tree canopy. As part of Art that Matters to the Planet: Interconnectivity, the Roger Tory Peterson Institute is accepting donations for a special project to plant trees in our community. The area where Roger Tory Peterson grew up has been identified for neighborhood revitalization by the Jamestown Renaissance Corporation (JRC). Funds raised by RTPI will support tree planting in Roger’s old neighborhood. To make a greater impact, donations to RTPI in support of this project will be matched by the Chautauqua Region Community Foundation’s Urban Forestry Fund.
Mend: New Drawings Planthouse Sept. 9-Oct.14, 2023
Untitled 57, 2023 44″ W x 60 “H, ink and collage on paper, Photo by Etienne Frossard
Mend-to make (something broken, worn, torn, or otherwise damaged) whole or sound by repairing, to set right, make better, to progress toward recovery.
The drawings in the larger room of the gallery all focus on plants used in a process known as phytoremediation. Each of these plants is able to absorb and transform ecological degradation in water and earth. Sunflower, mustard, vittata, pennycress, poplar, phragmite, indiangrass, and willow are variously used to remediate nitrogen, phosphorus, radiation, lead, cadmium, trichlorethene, and more. The drawings explore the contemporary alchemy of this important transformative biological process in a time of ongoing environmental crisis.
The drawings in the second room of the gallery are self portraits which have been cut into weft, which is then woven into a warp cut into a landscape. Each landscape image depicts a scene of global warming: a melting glacier, dead trees, and more. The structural matrix of the woven paper connotes the inextricable connection of each individual to the larger fate of our one warming planet.
Sunflower: Radioactive waste, Zinc, Copper, Cadmium. Poplar: Tricloroethylene, Chlorinated Solvents. Mustard: Zinc, Cadmium, Lead, Nickel, Willow: Arsenic, Cadmium, Zinc, Copper, Lead, Nickel. Indiangrass: Agrochemical residues. Phragmite: Nitrogen and Phosphorus in water. Pennycress: Cadmium, Zinc. Water Lettuce: Copper, Iron, Mercury. Vittata: Cadmium, Arsenic
To Be-Named, Opalka Gallery, Albany, NY Sept. 1–Oct.14, 2023
From Here to There, 2023
wood, felt, clay
6’ H x 14” D x 2′ W
Photo by Etienne FrossardCurated by Krista Caballero
List of Participating Artists:
Aarati Akkapeddi
Birding the Future (Krista Caballero and Frank Ekeberg)
Jeremy Dennis
Ellen Driscoll
Jean-Marc Superville Sovak
Jenny Irene Miller
Luz María Sánchez
Bently Spang
Sayo’:klʌ Kindness Williams
Keith Wilson
Elizabeth Withstandley
Saya Woolfalk
zhaoyuefanWe acknowledge the traditional homelands of the Mohican, Haudenosaunee, and Schaghticoke, upon which the Opalka Gallery resides
Acts of naming are not merely descriptive or representative—they have creative capacity and actively take part in shaping our worlds. As a multi-sited, multidisciplinary exhibition, To Be—Named reflects upon how names are created and used to shape, reshape, and sometimes mis-shape, our worlds, and identities. Artists included in the exhibitions investigate, contend with, and complicate naming practices to reveal ways that personal experiences often collide with collective ones, creating our political, cultural, and ecological realities.From Here to There
A small woolen hooded jacket with the edges of maps cut into the hems, hangs on a branch. Maps of all the continents of the world fall from a sleeve and hang on the opposite end of the branch.
A fragment of a woolen blanket cut into the map of an urban plan hangs from the branch behind these maps.
A bird, perspectively small, as if seen from a great distance, overlooks the maps below.The sculpture presents the viewer with a freeze frame of an absent figure temporarily in stasis during a larger transit. The one to one scale of the child size jacket is juxtaposed with the great distances of the entire world, seen in miniature in the continental maps cut out of felt. The plan of the unnamed city, also cut out of the woolen felt, suggests both a blanket, and a potential destination within the larger scale of the cascading world maps. The sculpture holds these micro and macro scale juxtapositions in suspension—in between departure and arrival.
Murmuration, Ruffin Gallery, University of Virginia, August 25-Oct 6, 2023
Spirit familiar, 2023
15″ x 15″
ink on paperCurated by Elizabeth Schoyer
Artists: Golnar Adili, Michael Bogin, Erin Crowe, Ellen Driscoll, Ellen Gallup, Rachel Lane, Kera McKenzie,Andrew Mausert-Mooney, Sarah Morrison, Kristen Nyce, Danielle Riede, Martha Saunders, Sandy Williams IV
sojourner
A small woolen hooded jacket hangs on a branch. Maps of all the continents of the world fall from both sleeves and hang on the opposite ends of two branches.
A bird overlooks the maps below.The sculpture presents the viewer with a freeze frame of an absent figure temporarily in stasis during a larger transit. The one to one scale of the child size jacket is juxtaposed with the great distances of the entire world, seen in miniature in the continental maps cut out of felt. The sculpture holds these micro and macro scale juxtapositions in suspension—held in stasis in between departure and arrival. The bird is at rest, but connotes the greater atmospheric spaces within which birds fly.
Spirit Familiar
A bird at rest on a horizon line, is mirrored below the line, as if reflected in water. The map of Charlottesville, Virginia forms the space of reflection below the line. Starry points of light encircle both birds, as if transmitting pulses of energy that communicate across the line.
The 36th Parallel, Track 16 Gallery, LA Aug. 12-Sept. 9, 2023
Self Portrait 21, 2023
16″ W x 12″H
digital print, ink on paperCuratorial Statement “The 36th Parallel” explores the cross sections of conscious and unconscious landscapes informed by visual navigations guided by historic, domestic and economic compasses. The 36th parallel north in particular has been defined as is a circle of latitude that is 36 degrees north of the Earth’s equatorial plane that crosses Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, Asia, the Pacific Ocean, North America and the Atlantic Ocean. In the ancient Mediterranean world, its role for navigation and geography was similar to that played by the Equator today. Featuring select works by seven interdisciplinary practices artists, “The 36th Parallel” opens the conversation with various entry points of our social and cultural geography through material, image and assemblages. Curated by Los Angeles artist Beth Davila Waldman, “The 36th Parallel” is a global platform of geographic and cultural connective tissues that speaks to the root of her own artistic practice as well as those of fellow participating artists from San Francisco to Los Angeles, Brooklyn to Berlin, India to Iran. Waldman has found inspiration for this exhibition in exploring liminal realms through terrains of ground and water, industry and economy, sanctuary and prosperity. Fellow Wellesley College graduate of Waldman’s Cathy Simon recently published book Occupation: Boundary, Art, Architecture and Culture at the Water which defines idea the of liminal realms as “transitional places, combinations of people and goods, events and structures, habitats of interaction between ideas, things and territories; sites for exchange and shipping, making and taking.” This Book along side those of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost as well as Thomas Cole’s Series “The Course of Empire” have been of service in developing the concepts of this exhibition. As Waldman walks the grounds of the Hudson Valley during her monthly visits to her Kingston studio as well as frequent family visits to Charlottesville where she has frequently toured Jefferson’s Monticello as well as the downtown alley where Heather Heyer was run over and killed during the Unite the Right protest in 2017, the charged role of landscape throughout time continued to ignite for her. In this exhibit, the current atmosphere of the Anthropocene is considered on macro and micro levels, across our great oceans as well as within a hands reach.
Participating Artists
Ellen Driscoll, New York
Uma Rani Iyli, San Francisco / Los Angeles
Liz Miller Kovacs, Berlin
Katie Murken, Oakland
Alex Nichols, San Francisco
Beth Davila Waldman, Los Angeles / New York
Minoosh Zomorodinia, San Francisco
Writers & Books Ellen Driscoll Artist Talk
October 7 @ EST 6:30 pm – 7:15 pm
Artist in Residence | Gallery Talk with Ellen Driscoll
Writers and Books
Rochester, New York
www.wab.orgBehind the Curtain: View Eyechart, then join us for artist Ellen Driscoll’s talk on her creative process.
Admission is free. Gift donations are appreciated.
The gallery talk will also be streamed via Zoom.
Eyechart Exhibition at Writers and Books
Sept 9-November 5, 2022
Writers and Books
Rochester, New York
www.wab.orgSept. 9: Opening event 5-7
Oct.7: Conversation–Ellen Driscoll 6:30-7:15
Nov. 4: Poetry Reading—Kathy Engel 6:30-7:15
Shapeshift
July 30-September 4
Fridman Gallery
Beacon, NY
Whether Weather
August 13-September 25
CREATE,
Catskill NY
The Garden of Friends Exhibition at the Leiber Collection
“Eyechart” banners
Collaboration Ellen Driscoll and Kathy Engel
May 28-December 31, 2022
Intersection Provincetown
Kentler International Drawing Space Benefit
100 WORKS ON PAPER VIRTUAL BENEFIT
October 16 & 17You can support our vital organization while growing your art collection or giving the gift of art to a loved one! Here’s how it works
PREVIEW ARTWORKS: Benefit Artworks
Gowanus Open Studios
Please join us 12-6 October 16 and 17
232 Third Street for a curated exhibition as part of Gowanus Open Studios
VIVA launch: Virtual Visiting Artists
This is an exciting new initiative that I am part of, with a dynamic group of artists.
https://www.vivavirtualartists.org/
Wake
Curated by Michele L’Heureux opens May 6 at Dorsky Gallery
Wake examines the power of water to sustain life and to destroy it and also looks at what is left in its wake. The paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations in this exhibition explore the sheer force of water in the form of waves, storms, and energy, as well as the aftermath of water once it retreats: parched earth, invasive plants, dwindling animal populations, human illness. The visual dialogue between these six artists invites reflection and discussion on the impact of global climate change
Wake examines the power of water to sustain life and to destroy it and also looks at what is left in its wake. The paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations in this exhibition explore the sheer force of water in the form of waves, storms, and energy, as well as the aftermath of water once it retreats: parched earth, invasive plants, dwindling animal populations, human illness. The visual dialogue between these six artists invites reflection and discussion on the impact of global climate change
Outstanding Educator Award, International Sculpture Center
