above: we're installing today at Mixed Greens (sorry for the blue-cast on the photos; I'm not an experienced photographer, obviously)
Hope you can join us for the opening of Joseph Smolinski's "Beginning of the End", opening this Thursday at Mixed Greens, 6-8pm.
A bit about the show:
Mixed Greens is thrilled to present Joseph
Smolinski’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. He will exhibit
drawing, sculpture, and video related to the environment and the power
struggles between nature and technology.
This new body of work
marks the expansion of Smolinski’s focus. Over the past few years,
Smolinski created a world in which cellular communication towers
disguised as trees infiltrated the landscape. There, technology proved
victorious through these hybrid forms. In the new works, Smolinski
visualizes a turning of the tide, where animals and nature play more
active roles in their fate.
A new series of drawings, titled Disconnected,
directly pits animals against the parasitic cell-tower trees. Here
Smolinski envisions a time when the animals decide to reclaim their
habitats. And in related projects such as Taking Back the Jetty and
Cemetery (no doubt influenced by oil companies’ recent attempts to
exploit the site of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty), Smolinski questions
both the history and preservation of art and the environment as we
exhaust our supply of cheap fuel.
Finally, in an installation
titled Broken Bough, a tree limb with an attached cell tower
seems to have crashed through the gallery wall. Still blinking, the
tower appears a casualty, struggling to survive; it’s metal leaves
wilted and crumbling.
Beginning of the End brings these
projects together to reflect on our current interactions with the
landscape. It poses questions related to our constant struggle to
control the environment and imagines an optimistic, though sometimes
apocalyptic, view of the future.
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