about the exhibition
The seemingly out of control human impact on our times has left us with a feeling that life as we know it is endangered. We are interested in how you interpret these themes, ranging from our environmental impact to threats on the planet, civilization, and progress. For this exhibition, the St. Louis Artists' Guild is looking for works in all media, including but not limited to painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, ceramics, mix-media, digital art, video art, and installation art that explores the increasing sense of peril of our planet.
important dates
Exhibition Dates: August 9 – September 7, 2019
Opening Time: Friday August, 9 at 5:00 pm
Gallery Talk: Wednesday, August 21 at 7:00 pm
Clean Water at Risk (a Discussion): Thursday, September, 5 at 7:00pm
List of Juried Artists: Tammy Kushnir, Sheri Mertzlufft, Jenny E. Balisle, Emily Tucci, Byron Rogers, Tracey Donnelly Franklin, Charlene Colombini, Adrienne Patel, Chad Thompson, Robert Toll, Adam Long, Laura Lebeda, Laurel Izard, Terry Lay, Anna Drake, Lee Pierce, Kim Curtis, Meghan Quinn, Judith Repke, Scott Sherman, Robert Bolla, Viktoria Ford, Phil Robinson, Alison Erazmus, Pete Wintersteen, Adam Kalinowski, Stacey Schuman, Jenina Brown, Pamela Daugherty, Emily Weber, Ginger Rasmussen, Martha Chason-Sokol, Ruthy Kolker, Lindsay Higa, Leah deMatta, Marilyn Smith, John Herdecke, Joshua Hobson, Kimberly Schroeder, Lisa Maione, Hilary Hitchcock
Winners:
1st Place- Anna Drake, Plastic Bags, 2018
2nd Place- Ginger Rasmussen, Symbiosis: Mutual, but not Exclusive , 2019
3rd Place- Pete Wintersteen, Capitol Reef Off-Roading, 2019
Honorable Mention
Byron Rogers, Influencers, 2019
Jenina Brown, Mourning Brooches for Roadkill, 2019
Juror: Olivia Lahs-Gonzales
Olivia Lahs-Gonzales is director of the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis where she curates exhibitions, directs educational programs, and fundraises for six gallery spaces devoted to photography, architecture, jazz history, St. Louis artists and collections, and children's art. Publications and essays include My Nature: Works with Paper by Kiki Smith (St. Louis Art Museum[SLAM],1999), Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the 20th Century (SLAM, 1997), and Photography in Modern Europe: The Spring 1996 Bulletin of The Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM 1996), Currents 81: Glenn Ligon (SLAM, 2000), To Unseal the Deeper Nature in Inge Morath, (Prestel and Kunsthalle, Vienna, 1999), Josephine Baker: Image and Icon (Reedy Press and the Sheldon, 2006), Imagining the Founding of St. Louis (Sheldon, 2013); Ralston Crawford and Jazz (Sheldon, 2011); Larry Fink: Attraction and Desire – 50 years in Photography (Sheldon, 2011) and Secrets of Real Estate: John Gossage (Sheldon, 2008) Traveling exhibitions include Josephine Baker: Image and Icon, (to the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2006) and Ralston Crawford and Jazz, (to the New Orleans Museum of Art, 2012). Lahs-Gonzales has taught the history of photography at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, where she was Adjunct Assistant Professor. Also a practicing artist, she has exhibited her work in St. Louis, Chicago, London, Taipei and Tokyo.
In the curated gallery:
Frackturing Time and Space:
Re-Constructing the Landscape of an Economic Boom
By artist: Steve Brown
When considering the landscape, through imagery or otherwise, the dialectic of nature and culture is always close at hand. Whether through the lens of J. B. Jackson’s vernacular, where he states that no landscape can be understood without acknowledging and understanding the culture that interacts with it, or Mercea Eliade’s notion that a landscape is a stage in which humans influence nature by speeding it up or slowing it down, a temporal relationship. I would add another role humanity plays in the interaction with the landscape and that is one of collection and dispersion, one of spaciality.
In this series I have imposed the vertical format on a traditionally horizontal subject. By deemphasizing the horizon line, a central element and perspective device in the Western rational treatment of space (and perhaps closely related to the notion of propriety) and emphasizing the vertical, the relationship of the topography with the alchemic dance of the elements in the atmosphere, it begins to tell a different story perhaps, one of symbiosis.
Because these images are a result of both analogue and digital technologies, and there are plenty of hints to both processes in the work, it seems that as a photographer I have stepped outside of my tradition, but as an artist I have begun to explore a new visual language that I am just beginning to understand. The landscape of the high plains has been largely ignored by artists, as it lacks the geographical forms and biological species that are fundamental elements in traditional landscape imagery. It is as if the land was intended for nomadic cultures to move through but never to inhabit or civilize. This couldn’t be more true than when considering the boomtown economy which has been imposed on these grasslands as a result of the oil and gas extraction technology referred to as hydraulic fracturing.
Fracking, as it is called, is a process in which thousands of gallons of water are mixed with tons of sand and chemicals and forced under extremely high pressure to create fissures in the shale formation two miles down below the surface and up to as many miles horizontally in order to extract the embedded oil. It is a relatively expensive process and is only economically viable if the demand for oil is high on the global market. The process has many critics who are concerned with, among other things, the environmental impact the practice has, such as oil spills, ruptured pipelines and oil train derailments as well as the practice of injecting the chemically saturated water back into the earth for permanent storage after it has been used.
Obviously I have concentrated on the machines and structures of the industry. The actual processes only exist visually in the designs and mind’s eye of the engineers and technicians who devised them. Yet the presence of these industrial devices, so concentrated in a geological region of the vast high plains known as the Bakken Shale Formation, might cause us, like Jackson to ask: what is the nature of this culture that interacts with the land in such a manner?
On the Ramp Gallery: All About Owls
Presented by: The Youth and Family Center
