Opening Reception: Saturday September 16th, 7 - 9 pm, with a performance by Saya Woolfalk at 8:30 pm.
Second Gallery is pleased to present the first installment of PEACE KING MOTHER NATURE, a show in two parts that will span the fall. PEACE KING MOTHER NATURE explores the conceptual terrain of the binary of "nature" and "culture, " in an attempt to rethink the authority of this binary in regards to gender, race, technology, and popular culture. Michael Bell-Smith, Diane Carr, Thomas Doran, and Saya Woolfalk, the four artists whose work comprises the first installment of PEACE KING MOTHER NATURE, all create works that challenge the saliency of the conceptual opposition between "nature" and "culture" and present opportunities to rethink these allegedly innate categories. This exhibition begins with the premise that the nature/culture binary is at the center of a web of other binaries, such as the conceptual opposition between femininity and masculinity, the body and the mind/soul, wilderness and rationality, fluidity and autonomy, all of which must be reexamined if we are to move forward into new ways of thinking, being, and understanding subjectivity and culture.
Saya Woolfalk's installation and performance, Winter Garden, explores the linkages between nature, wilderness, primitivism, femininity, and racial otherness though the creation of a painstakingly crafted "natural" environment and wildly dancing costumed performers that reference the first colonial encounters with the new world. Winter Garden was in the PS1's Greater New York show in 2005. Diane Carr's Forest Floor, in a similar way, engages the connections between feminity, craft, nature, and fantasy, through the creation of a fantastical felted portion of the forest floor, created in materials relegated to the aisles of the craft shop and the children's classroom. The videos of Michael Bell-Smith, entitled Above and Beyond and Continue 2000, utilize the visual language of video games, especially the video game's depiction of natural imagery, to create works that point to the way in which the video game and online worlds can no longer be viewed as outside of the natural, but rather, as definitive of it in the way that media and the virtual always shape our understanding of nature. Michael Bell-Smith's work as a whole explores the role of authenticity and originality in the digital age, focusing on the malleability of the computer pixel as a means to examine the role of digital forms in contemporary life and notions of "progress." He is represented by Foxy Production. Thomas Doran contributes two pieces to the show: Untitled, a wall sculpture of an antlered skeletal head adorned with orange floppy ears made of electrical tape, and Jus/tice, Thun/ders, Con/dem/na/tion, a series of miniature hexagonal islands of sand, moss, and tiny paths and fences. This piece embodies the conflict inherent in the birds-eye-view: through the creation of a masculinized understanding of the world from outside and above, a feminized miniature is created in which an intense focus on smallness prevents the viewer from understanding "the big picture." All together, the works in PEACE KING MOTHER NATURE play with and explore the definition of, relation between, and the history of these two terms - "nature" and "culture" - from a variety of points: gender, race, the miniature, popular culture, technology, video games, architecture, and craft.
For more information, including more writing on this show, links and information about all the artists, and a look at the artists in part two pf PEACE KING MOTHER NATURE please visit www.secondgallery.org.
PEACE KING MOTHER NATURE will be on view from September 16 to October 15, 2006, with an opening reception on Saturday September 16th, 7 - 9 pm, and a performance by Saya Woolfalk at 8:30 pm. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 12 to 6pm.
Second Gallery
The Distillery, 516 East 2nd Street, South Boston, MA 02127.
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