Social Ecologies

David Brooks, The Canary Project, Laura Grace Chipley, Cynthia Daignault, Rackstraw Downes, Josephine Halvorson, Marc Handelman, Ellie Irons, Trevor Paglen, Mary Miss, Roxy Paine, Alexis Rockman, Martha Rosler, Charles Simonds, Robert Smithson, Gio Sumbadze, Tattfoo Tan, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Allyson Vieira, Matthew C. Wilson, Kevin Zucker As a visual equivalent of the Critics Page in the Brooklyn Rail edited by Greg Lindquist, the exhibition Social Ecologies exemplifies the thought form of artists who work directly or indirectly with the environment. The exhibition addresses ecological and social issues embedded within the landscape through both images and objects, as well as actions, relational networks and discourses. This exhibit does not necessarily set out to directly solve social and ecological dilemmas, but expose them in all their complexities in integral, rich and provocative ways. Social Ecologies will evoke and widen the dialogue on the urgency of the subject of ecology, rather than generalizing, romanticizing or poeticizing. Many artists not only visualize the invisible land, water and air pollution, but also its often-ignored social and economic impact. Other artists invoke meditations on our complex links between human impact on the environment, the relations among people, and the natural world’s response. By integrating the social and the ecological, this exhibition aims to complicate the conventions of landscape.  Creating an immersive space for meditation on these urgent issues, walls painted with color and an elliptical perimeter of more than 9,000 pounds of soil will bring the tactile and retinal sensation of elements of the outdoors into the gallery environment. Forming an interior and exterior space within the exhibition space, the soil will draw a mutable boundary between nature and urbanity and, in a sisyphean task, be swept back daily after it migrates into the main space of the gallery. As an ecosystem, the gallery will provide an experience with objects and immersive space as well as dialogue about environmental and social concerns, through various programming such as workshops, film screenings, panel discussions and performances. Social Ecologies will be accompanied by a free catalogue supported by the Daedalus Foundation. Greg Lindquist is an artist and writer, and the editor of the Art Books in Review section of the Brooklyn Rail. He has also taught at MoMA, Parsons, Pratt Institute, Ramapo, RISD and SUNY Purchase. His latest series of ecologically responsive paintings will be shown in an installation at the North Carolina Museum of Art in spring of 2016. He was recently a resident of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, and received the Pollock Krasner Grant in 2009. He is currently developing several collaborative projects that focus on the Newtown Creek, the polluted three- and-a-half mile estuary that forms the border between Brooklyn and Queens. PROGRAMMING Feb 7, 2016, 4 pm The Forms of Time: Architecture + Ecology Josephine Halvorson, Gio Sumbadze, Allyson Vieira, Kevin Zucker, moderated by Greg Lindquist Please join artists Josephine Halvorson, Gio Sumbadze, Allyson Vieira and Kevin Zucker for a lively discussion of the relationship between history, architecture, and landscape in their artistic practices, moderated by Rail Curatorial Projects curator Greg Lindquist. Whether drawn to vernacular fragments or regional variants of modernism, the panelists will discuss their diverse range of processes, and how these reflect their aesthetic, conceptual, and temporal concerns. Sumbadze is a Georgian artist engaging with the influence of the Soviet Union on his home country’s architecture and its relationship to his photographic documentation projects. He is joined by Vieira, a New York-based sculptor whose materials often include ones of building construction, Halvorson, a painter whose empathetic paintings from observation often depict fragments of archiecture evoking their histories, and Zucker, a painter whose work explores the ways in which the external world is visually archived and stored. February 13, 2016, 4-6 pm Social Practice + Ecology Artist Ellie Irons will present a workshop focusing on making watercolor paints from invasive and weedy plants. Featuring a short tour of the gallery garden and the opportunity for participants to take home their own pigment. Artist Tattfoo Tan will offer a lecture and demonstration focused on creating and maintaining a backyard chicken coop in New York City. The Canary Project, Ellie Irons and Tattfoo Tan in conversation, moderated by Jess Wilcox, in relation to ecology and social practice. Jess Wilcox is the director of exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park. February 13, 2016, 7pm Brooklyn Rail HQ, 253 36th St, 3rd Floor Community + Ecology Charles Simonds, Laura Grace Chipley and Junior Walk (The Appalachian Mountaintop Patrol), moderated by Lauren van Haaften-Schick Screenings of video works by Charles Simonds and Laura Grace Chipley with The Appalachian Mountaintop Patrol, followed by a discussion moderated by Lauren van Haaften-Schick. The gallery will be open following the discussion for a reception. Lauren van Haaften-Schick an artist and curator working towards a PhD in the History of Art at Cornell University, and is Associate Director of the Art & Law Program in New York.

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254 36th St

Brooklyn, NY