MARQUEE PROJECTS is delighted to present Pathological Landscape, a group exhibition co-curated with Elizabeth Johnson and featuring the artwork of Michael De Feo, Kevin Ford, David Kennedy Cutler, Carly Haffner, Catherine Haggarty, Tyler Healy, Elizabeth Johnson, Lizbeth Mitty, Katia Ramsey Read, Lauren Ruiz, Carol Saft, Kevin Sloan, Agathe Snow and Paul Wackers. An opening reception will be held on Friday, August 6 from 5-7pm.
For centuries, artists have tended to romanticize and glorify nature and our place in it as a means of exalting humankind. But the work of Pathological Landscape ponders humans as a pathogen, and considers the causes, effects, and treatments of our impact on nature as our most important contemporary links to it. Progress comes at a price, and though possessed with the guilt that our conveniences have likely caused the environmental problems we suffer, most of the population either deny or ignore the issue. At best, anxiety about pollution, viruses, and climate change have spurred flailing, expensive, short-term fixes.
Enter the artist. The pieces shown in Pathological Landscapesuggest that the place between humans and nature has itself become an object or an inhabitable zone, a vehicle, an invitation to at least do or make something. The artist interprets extreme weather, catastrophe, food insecurity, and epidemics in stereo with lyricism, irony, wistfulness, innocence, and beauty. Perhaps the cycles of human behavior that drive the disease will induce adaptation and we will engineer solutions in harmony with the earth’s natural processes. In the meantime, it feels right to respond to the inscrutability and correctness of nature, and to rearrange romanticism to fit this moment.
Michael's contribution is the Pre-Raphaelite takeover painting pictured here.
Untitled (Songs of the Morning by Henrietta Rae, 1904), 2017, Acrylic and giclée on paper., 29 x 17 3/4 inches (73.7 x 45.1 cm)
For further information, please contact info@marqueeprojects.org
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