Dark Nature: Part 1
111 Front Street Galleries
Dark Nature: Part 1
Opening: September 8th, 6pm-9pm
at 111 Front Street Galleries (also at 55 Washington Street) Suite #230 DUMBO, Brooklyn 11201
By train take the F Train to York Street,� A/C� to High Street, 2/3� to Clark Street�
September 8-28th, 2005
Gallery Hours: Thurs-Sat. 12-5pm & by appointment
Artists:�A.J. Bocchino, Rob Carter, Megan Cump, Erika DeVries, Les Joynes, Leah Oates,�Julie Peppito,�Andrea Polli,�Pierre St-Jacques, Hyungsub Shin
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Station Independent Projects Presents Dark Nature: Part 1 featuring work that focuses on the mysterious and ominous side of the natural environment. Nature is often seen as being pure and frequently has been idealized throughout art history. The work in Dark Nature: Part 1 shows nature in all of its wildness, vast and strange and unknowable.
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Photographer A.J. Bocchino travels regularly to faraway parts of the world and while on location takes numerous photographs. Bocchino then creates photomontages that show the vast number of images taken in a locations. The sheer amount of images, almost like a contact sheet on the wall, show nature shifting and in all its peculiar variety.
Rob Carter?s video animations depict groups of people caught in humorous yet scarily collapsing spaces or jumping into shifting worlds. The landscapes cave�into windows opening into other worlds and give way to absurd architecture, clutter, changing weather or disappearing surroundings. Carter?s work emphasizes the randomness and chaotic aspect of nature.
Megan Cump?s photographic series ?Dark Matter? depicts eerie, curious, and seemingly supernatural environments.� This series of disorienting photographs, shot during a night blizzard, evoke the infinite as the snowflakes swarm like clusters of stars engulfing the landscape.�
Photographic murals by Erika DeVries have a sense of femininity and of nature slightly out of control. The work� was inspired by fairy tales and the change in the seasons. Her work shows the effects, both psychological and physically, that the changes have on her and others.�
Les Joynes? current series "Natural Displacement" explores eerie virtual windows on a nature transformed. Shot in his native Southern California the images are objects in nature shot in artificial light that creates a disturbing dark natural setting. The work is based on internal oppositional elements within an image where recognized objects are posited in opposing existences: light/ dark, benign/ dangerous, artifice/nature.�
The PARADURA Three Series by photographer Leah Oates was shot on location in Sister, Oregon while on an artist residency. The landscape there is ancient yet foreboding, unpredictable and made desolate by root rot, fires and clear-cutting. This gives the�landscape a grand and gothic quality. Oates?s work shows the gothic yet exquisite character of this site.
Julie Peppito invents new forms of nature from the by products of her role as a conspicuous consumer. Peppito?s installations are sculpted narratives that investigate what our relationship is to others, the planet and the environment. She questions if the human relationship to the planet and others is symbiotic or parasitic. Peppito?s work evaluates the sustainability of systems that nourish us alongside a massive and wasteful consumer culture.
Andrea Polli is a digital media artist who addresses issues related to sciences, technology and the environment in contemporary society. Polli combines seemingly disparate ideas, data and mediums to create visionary views of the environment in the future. Polli uses sound as a metaphorical medium for weather and has created innovative methods for experiencing the damaging effect of future weather and in the environment.�
Video by Pierre St-Jacques depicts a series of hills covered by countless fences and abandoned. The piece continually moves through the hills and every area is fenced off and without people, plants, animals or homes. St-Jacques comments on how humans repeatedly attempt to control and possess nature and strip it of its daunting wildness.�
Hyungsub Shin?s sculpture combines man-made objects covered with uncontrollable flora. His work contrasts the hardness and precision of synthetic objects with the waywardness and disorder of nature.�This contrast shows that humans mimic and borrow from nature but do not have control of it.
For more information or images please contact Leah Oates at �917.698.2012 or via e-mail�at leah@leahoates.com
