MIDDLETOWN, CT- Global Warning: Artists and Climate Change explores pressing environmental issues through the lens of visual artists. Although a number of the artists have collaborated or consulted with scientists and other experts, the aim of Global Warning is to increase awareness of climate change through challenging, often evocative, content that is laced with poetry and aesthetic power. Included in the exhibition are works by Marion Belanger, Nancy Cohen, Lenore Malen, Eve Mosher, Katie Shelly, Frances Whitehead, and students from Wesleyan University’s Architecture Research-Design-Build Studio taught by Elijah Huge.
The exhibition is curated by Nina Felshin, Zilkha Gallery’s Curator of Exhibitions, and organized in conjunction with Feet to the Fire, Wesleyan University’s 18-month climate change initiative.
Global Warning: Artists and Climate Change runs from Tuesday, April 28 through Sunday, May 24, 2009. The public is invited to attend the opening reception on Friday, May 1 from 5–7pm, with a curator’s talk at 5:30pm. Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Sunday, noon–4pm; Friday noon–8pm. The Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery is located at 283 Washington Terrace in Middletown, Connecticut. For more information visit www.wesleyan.edu/cfa or call 860-685-3355.
Chicago artist Frances Whitehead has formulated a new site-specific project entitled Wesleyan University PhenoLilac. She proposes to “repurpose” the mature lilac bush just outside the gallery as a phenologic observation point to measure long-range climate change.
Lenore Malen’s Harmony as a Hive consists of a traveling science museum and library located within a large sculpture, whose structure mirrors the geometry of the beehive. The work examines the ancient relationship of bees to human society in view of recent threats to the world’s bee population by globalization and climate change.
Elijah Huge, assistant professor of art, is the guiding hand behind the collaborative project SplitFrame, a site-specific and sustainable bird-viewing platform commissioned and built for a nearby sanctuary in 2008. The project, represented in the exhibition by a model and documentation, was conceived and executed by students in Professor Huge’s Architecture Research-Design-Build Studio.
Eve Mosher is represented by a video and documentation of her 2007 interactive and performance-based public artwork HighWaterLine on the New York City waterfront, which created an immediate visual and local understanding of the effects of climate change.
Made of handmade paper, Nancy Cohen’s lyrical sculptural installation Estuary: Moods and Modes is an evocation rather than a re-creation of her encounter with the vast quiet landscape of the Mullica River and Great Bay Estuary in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.
Marion Belanger’s Landfill, landscape photos printed on translucent fabric, was commissioned by Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts and Environmental Studies program for the Feet to the Fire Festival in 2008.
Bottled, by Wesleyan student Katie Shelly ’09, is a site specific installation that uses recycled perfume bottles to comment on challenging personal and social questions raised by the environmental movement and the activism that surrounds it.
