Room 83 Spring sent out the following information about its upcoming exhibit:
Art and the ecosystem convene in Dynamic Entities at Room 83 Spring featuring the work of David Buckley Borden, Rebecca Hutchinson, and Joel Longenecker. Sculpture, painting and works on paper, reveal art as the interface between nature’s cycles and processes and the parallel actions, proposals, and outcomes of each artist’s investigative studio practice.
Through mimesis, simulation, evidential re-presentation, and collaborative interpretation, Buckley Borden, Hutchinson, and Longenecker give testament to a complex community of interwoven physical factors and the ever-unfolding contingencies of nature itself. As a witness and participant, each artist explores themes of flux, flow, growth and decay, creation and its demise, to render an intimate experience of awe and the sublime.
A Cambridge-based interdisciplinary artist and designer, David Buckley Borden promotes a shared environmental awareness and heightened cultural value of ecology. Informed by research and community outreach, David’s work manifests in a variety of forms, ranging from site-specific landscape installations in the woods to data-driven cartography in the gallery. His mission-driven projects, often a
hybrid of art, design, and science communication, are intended to foster environmental awareness.
David was a 2016/2017 Charles Bullard Fellow in Forest Research at Harvard University and continues to work with Harvard researchers as a Harvard Forest Associate Fellow to answer the question, “How can art and design foster cultural cohesion around environmental issues and help inform ecology-minded decision making.”
Rebecca Hutchinson’s site-specific works and sculptural installations utilize traditional and non-traditional ceramic materials and processes. Influenced by ecosystem dynamics and environmental concerns, she considers the quality of coexistence and structural functionality found in nature. Formally and structurally, Hutchinson’s interest is in the details: quality of craft, connections, and structure, and conceptually an understanding of all physical parts to the whole. Her site-responsive clay and fibrous sculptural works are made from indigenous materials, such as recycled 100% natural fiber clothing or harvested garden materials beat down to pulp and formed into handmade sheets, and industrial castoff surplus materials, like cotton thread from the bedding industry or sisal from the burlap bag industry.
Joel Longenecker’s paintings are embodiments of the landscape — slabs of earth, sky and atmosphere. Like landscapes forming over time, his paintings evolve slowly, with each layer of paint consuming and burying the preceding one. The paintings emulate the layers of the earth’s strata, each with a unique history and topography. Longenecker is interested in how the painting process — applying, drying, scraping and reapplying – parallels the natural processes of growth and decay, build-up and erosion. His paintings aim to push past descriptive mandates, in pursuit of nature itself and relate a kind of transcendence where the physical properties of paint melt away and become something else: fields, wood, stone moss. The drama of that experience is his true subject.
Dynamic Entities
David Buckley Borden, Rebecca Hutchinson, and Joel Longenecker
May 12 – June 23
Reception: Saturday, May 12, 4 – 6
Gallery Hours: Thursdays and Saturdays 1 – 4
And anytime by appointment.