Artist Eve S. Mosher is drawing a blue chalk line through Brooklyn marking a point 10 feet above sea level, a boundary now used by federal and state agencies and insurance companies to show where waters could rise after a major storm. She strives to draw attention to projections that the chance of flooding up to or beyond her line could increase significantly as a result of global warming. As her project winds through the city she is followed by a reporter, a photographer, a video documentary maker, a fellow activist, an intern and a man named Edward Morris, one of the founders of a Brooklyn-based environmental organization called the Canary Project, which is helping Mosher carry out and publicize her work, reports the New York Times. Attention is attracted by the chalk line and education follows in the form of “action packets” handed to neighborhood residents, encouraging them to compost, bike, buy local produce and write lots of letters to politicians as ways to promote sustainability.

No Comments »

This new series of work by photographer Chris Jordan looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics tend to feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or a trillion dollars spent on the Iraq war. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed photographic prints assembled from tens-of-thousands of smaller images. The series is still in its early stages, and new images will be posted to Chris’ website as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

Below are three views of:

Cans Seurat, 2007
Digital C print, 6×7 feet

Depicting 106,000 aluminum cans, equal to the number of cans consumed in the US every thirty seconds.

No Comments »

Over on Emerge, they are talking about fine artist and commercial designer, Jon Santos teaming up with The Canary Project,
a photographic project devoted to documenting climate change via
powerful landscapes from environmental hotspots around the globe. Santos has created Dimensions Of Change a series of collaborative images utilizing motifs based on the utopian ideals of folks like Buckminster Fuller, a site specific sculpture and a video piece devoted to the theme of global warming and the issues it causes with water. The exhibition runs through the end of this week at Crane Arts Building
in Philadelphia, where it has been up since September 4. A billboard of
the collaboration between Santos and the Canary Project will run in
Philadelphia later this Fall to carry the message on once the
exhibition is closed. Creative and compelling, “Dimensions
of Change” makes truly moving art out of one of the greatest dilemmas
facing humanity in the 21st Century

No Comments »

Check out the latest exhibition at Julie Baker Fine Art, paintings, works on paper and photographic cut out collages by Waddy Armstrong and Meghan Gerety.

Waddy Armstrong paints colorful, delicate, painted silhouettes of trees and shrubs. Says Armstrong, “My work explores the connection between science, modern art and the natural world. Inspired by the strange lines and quirky shapes that occur in nature, I take characteristics of various plants and combine them into hybridized semi-abstract compositions.”

Juxtaposed with Armstrong’s colorful silhouettes are the graphite paintings of New York based artist Meghan Gerety.

The contemplative nature of Meghan Gerety’s work reflects both her practice of Eastern philosophy and her immersion in the history of modern and contemporary painting. The subject of her work is the landscape. Based on photographs, collected from her travels, her landscapes fuse the exploration of inner-self with the gestural energy of action painting. Inspired by vast open spaces and the nature of trees, the work depicts an emotional and spiritual response to the landscape. Enjoy.

No Comments »