If you can touch it, is it real? From zoos to bouquets, this exhibition will explore simulations and reconstructions of the natural world - and the feelings of enchantment or, conversely, unease that those simulations can produce. Spanning media from painting to performance, five artists create, document, and imitate organisms and ecosystems which may be “real”, but only in the strictest sense of the world.
About Jill R Baker: visual artist, aimless gatherer, whose work relies on chance and natural phenomena, with a bit of surrealism, to guide mark making and performance. We are gatherers and gleaners who sometimes mistake a fallen tree limb covered in lichen and moss for the body of an animal. We kneel by the water to return rocks to the creek. If there is no water we look under rock until our hands turn pink. We measure rainfall each morning in the garden beginning in the fall and think of ways to make drawings with raindrops. Sometimes the wind gusts and for a moment our instinct catches the presence of a predator nearby. We were a deer in our previous life.
We Will Come to Believe that Our Hands Are Made of Rock explores material, embodiment, enigma, and experience. Through this re-enactment of a classic experiment in perception, we will come to believe that our hands are made of rock. In the original study (1998, Botvinick and Cohen), subjects sit with one forearm resting on a table with a divider blocking their arm from sight. With their own arm obscured from view, they feel a paintbrush stroking their arm while watching a researcher perform the same action on a rubber arm. As the study participants observe the paintbrush on the rubber arm and simultaneously feel the same action on their own skin, they perceive the rubber arm as their own. Scientists have performed variations of the study switching out materials and exploring ideas of embodiment, illusion, and multi-sensory perception for many different purposes.
I want to show you that your Hand is made of Rock. Sit here. Put on these headphones and watch the screen. How Does your hand feel? Does your hand feel like it is made of rock?
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Jiwon Rhie (based in Brooklyn, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist who works with sculpture, video, and photography to share her ideas. Her work deals with diverse subject matters to explore ideas of boundaries, human relationships, identity, and communication. She holds a BFA from Hongik University(10’ Visual Communication Design), Hannam University (14’ Fine Arts), and an MFA at Pratt Institute. Her Flower Dogs (which may be thought of as animatronic bouquets) bark and walk at different paces to meet and bump into each other, generating unexpected events, interacting with visitors, desiring to be loved.
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CC Teakell is an artist and baker living on stolen Chinook land in Portland, Oregon. She is interested in the ontological and how that relates to the political. She lives with her partner, her dog, and twenty-three houseplants.
This book explores the duality between the self and the society it inhabits, what it means to assimilate, and what we lose in the process.
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Claire Elliott is a painter who lives and works in Portland, OR. She received her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2014.
My paintings are centered around explorations of the natural world. My subjects shift between straightforward representations of botanical collections and domestic gardens into an abstract language that seeks to replicate the unruly bounty of plants. These plants are all cultivated by humans: carefully tended to in orchards, archived in greenhouses and adopted into homes. In all of these spaces, specimens that would never meet in the wild commingle in manmade corrals. Viewed either as aesthetic adornments or utilitarian (but bountiful) agriculture sites, gardens are often associated with the feminine. This dual identity of the beautiful and the functional is central to the paintings themselves: the rigid grids of the greenhouse contrast with crowded, unusual plant forms. The abstract passages in these works hint at explorations of the elemental and mystical qualities of paint- its ability to mimic and its material allure often fighting each other, occasionally coalescing in harmony.
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Brooke Johnson is an artist currently working and exploring in Fort Worth, Texas after recently receiving her BFA and BA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her photographic work utilizes artifacts of image-making to present ecological subjects that metamorphose from the eerily mundane into the mysteriously sublime. Her use of transformative lighting, campy lens filters, and blurry exposures operate as signifiers of the photographer’s presence, further activating the strangeness of simulated nature. The content of her images and their specific display work together to create a visually vacillating, complex ecosystem that engages a diverse spectrum of questions surrounding our human relationship with the natural world.
