ta k i n g t e m p e rature 09.08.18 - 10.13.18
Cover Image: Alana Rios. Measure, 2017. Inkjet Print from 120 Film Scan.
tak i n g
t e m p e r atu r e
Noah Greene (UC Davis) Amber Eve Imrie (Stanford) Darcy Padilla (UC Davis) Alana Rios (SJSU) Joseph Robertson (SFAI) Stephanie Sherriff (Stanford) HyeYoon Song (CCA) Mika Sperling (SFAI) Tashi Wangdhu (Mills) Eve Werner (SFAI)
Taking Temperature is a group exhibition presented in tandem with Coal + Ice, a documentary photography exhibition and climate festival coming to Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture this Fall. Co-curator of Coal + Ice and Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, along with independent curator Jillian Schultz, selected ten artists whose work is concerned with the consequences of climate change. On both a personal and global scale, how have these shifts affected landscapes, cultures, and communities? What are the implications of living in a country whose government actively denies climate science? Themes include extreme weather events, apocalyptic scenes from the present and future, the refuse created by consumer capitalism and, overall, an urgent plea for environmental activism. The artists address these issues poetically, exploring the emotional impact of a rapidly changingworld and capturing those feelings with varying aesthetic approaches.
NOAH GREENE || UC DAVIS
Noah Greene. Not Yet Titled, 2018. Chair frames, rib, antler.
“I work within a fractured narrative, a material language of peripheral America. I want to expose disquiet in the mundane; presence in absence. I came up in stagnant lumber towns and the fringes of dried up cities. These places echo in my work. Temporary structures age into permanence as the purpose hollows out. I try foreground scarcity in a swell of mass production, basic human necessity in discarded objects— time passed and a failing future. My practice is a looping sequence of observation, collection, alteration and arrangement— sculpture always shifting to fill the space it inhabits. Aspirations go to seed and implicate the whole place.”
AMBER EVE IMRIE || STANFORD
“I was raised in an illusion of a house; where the separation of interior and exterior were not distinct. Parts of our home were left unfinished which left whole sections exposed to the elements. Wild animals regularly and easily penetrated our attempt at domestic bliss and the Arkansas wilderness mingled with our home furnishings. My work is based through my lived experiences but strives to understand the complexities and tensions between rural and urban life. I maintain a special focus on how our cultural space informs our individual relationship with the natural world. I’m questioning how our class and cultural upbringing shapes the values we assign to our environment. I work with historically craftbased and domestically ripe materials as a way to relate to the home and the secure, while still asking us to deeply examine our presumptions. Through the integration of new media, like digital photography, I’m rooting us in time and asking us to reconsider materiality and gendered labor.”
Amber Eve Imrie. Isolation Can Insulate or Isolate, 2018. Archival pigment ink on cotton, batting, sewing thread.
DARCY PADILLA || SFAI
Darcy Padilla. Untitled, 2018. Four Framed Archival Pigment Prints (center). Installation view.
“Moved and emotionally stretched by the Northern California wildfires, I explored our complex relationship with the natural landscape by photographing the aftermath. The scenes of the devastated homes are apocalyptic. There are no people. The images are sad and haunting reminders of human powerlessness. These wildfires occurred where houses sit on the edge of nature. In the U.S. that is almost 40% of all homes. The housing crisis and personal desire pushing the boundaries of cities — sprawl. What is the human and environmental toll of the return to the wilderness?”
Darcy Padilla. Untitled, 2018. Framed Archival Pigment Print.
ALANA RIOS || SJSU “My photographs abstract human activity onto landscape by using long exposures to compress many minutes of movement into one still frame. The single still images become a visual account of the kinetic agreement between human bodies, gravity and the land that illustrate a story like a modern-day cave painting. The lines of light both illuminate the surrounding details and record moments of unscripted curiosity.� This photograph shows the tufas of Mono Lake, limestone formations that grow exclusively underwater. The reason there are so many large tufa towers visible in this location is that in 1941, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began diverting Mono Lake’s tributary streams 350 miles south to meet the growing water demands of Los Angeles. Deprived of its freshwater sources, the volume of Mono Lake halved, while its salinity doubled. Unable to adapt to these changing conditions within such a short period of time, the ecosystem began to collapse. Since 1978 the Mono Lake Committee has been advocating to preserve Mono Lake. In 1994 the LADWP was ordered to refill the lake and there are still ongoing efforts for restoration.
Alana Rios. Slow Sculpture, 2017. Inkjet Print from 120 Film Scan.
JOSEPH ROBERTSON || SFAI
Joseph Robertson. Breathe, 2017. Mixed media.
“I do not create illusions, My work is what it is and nothing more. These works are made with materials whos tactile feel can be instantly recognizable and relatable even when not touched. This allows viewers in a way to touch and be touched without ever touching the piece. This relationship between artwork and viewer is always there and scale often helps to initiate this relationship, pieces all being at human scale or greater works to Initiate a conversation. Structures and traditional conventions of painting and working with textiles are questioned within the work, These structures and conventions can be seen to be analogous to the structures and conventions that surround us in our daily life.�
STEPHANIE SHERRIFF || STANFORD
“My work with grass is a collision of living and machine-made materials that result in ephemeral forms, intertwined with elements of chance and change over time. The work ultimately addresses life cycles and ecosystems, while reflecting upon the ubiquitous nature of cultivation, control, and oppression in relation to all living entities. Furthermore, my work with grass exposes a primal, human connection with grass as a material that moves toward a bodily, metaphorical parallel descriptive of the human experience. What does survival look like? At what point is intervention necessary and who or what is in control?�
Stephanie Sherriff. Untitled Poem, 2014. Luggage, earth, grass, field recording, media player, transducer, amplifier.
HYEYOON SONG || CCA
HyeYoon Song. Line of Fracture, 2017. Aluminum cast of a sidewalk crack.
“Ruins are a site in which the past, present and the future is seen simultaneously; a site by which the impact of the natural forces, agency of modernity and a collection of stories is evident. My work investigates our contemporary ruins by tracing the beginnings of ruins of our cityscape adjacent to the ever changing modern sites. I employ walking as a site in motion to make documentations of sites that exhibit the present decay of our urban terrain and enable one to imagine our future landscape. I locate concrete slabs of sidewalks that function as a matrix for retaining geological shifts, deterioration by the pedestrians, revealing perpetual change and failure. By collecting geological specimens which contain the marks of geological trauma and infiltration of nature, it is a mute witness to observe moments that becomes fixed in time.�
MIKA SPERLING || SFAI “I was born in Norilsk, a mining city in Northern Siberia where my family lived for 20 years. In 1991, at just 7 months my parents brought me and my 7 o lder siblings to the place where we lived out the majority of our lives: Darmstadt, Germany. I have always tried to understand the origins of my family as both a German and Russian citizen. In January 2018 I decided to reconnect with my roots by finally returning to my birthplace. Often I struggled to understand why the eldest members of my family who grew up in that far off land were so different than I. When I was nine, my father passed away, leaving me with many lingering questions about my f amily’s roots and legacy. As I grew older, these questions began to resonate loudly within me, pushing me to seek for answers. The people of Norilsk were forced to adapt to the extreme cold (as low as -67°F) and to accept a shortened life expectancy that the mining pollution causes. The climate change has lead to a permafrost thawing In Norilsk, leaving buildings at risk of collapsing and creating potential leaks in the pipelines of the Siberian tundra. With Norilsk's main industry relying on the metal mining the consequences of climate change also endangers the city’s economy.”
Mika Sperling. Before You - Above the Circle, 2018. Video. 8:46 min. Video still.
TASHI WANGDHU || MILLS
Tashi Wangdhu. Reflection, 2018. Oil on canvas.
“The inspiration for making this climate change project came to mind due to the unpredictable natural disasters that are happening around the world: escalating the tension of sustaining humanity between global warming and the planet earth. My paintings depict an apocalyptic moment.�
EVE WERNER || SFAI
“The Carbon series employs the Great Basin bristlecone pine, (Pinus longaeva), as a symbol for the precarious status of life on our warming planet. The works are smoke- and flame-stained embossments from molds made from fallen trees in the Ancient Bristlecone Forest, located in the White Mountains of California. Great Basin bristlecone pines evolved to fill a precise ecological niche. They grow in their harsh environment with virtually no competition from other tree species. The only contender, the limber pine, is found mostly in the lower reaches of the bristlecone forest. As climate change eases environmental conditions in the White Mountains, limber pines encroach into bristlecone territory while bristlecones are emerging further up the mountain peaks. At some point, the bristlecones may run out of habitat.�
Eve Werner. Carbon #1-8, 2018. Paper, smoke, ash.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Susan Meiselas Jillian Schultz Lauren Dare Marcel Houtzager Matt Lopez Brooke Valentine Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture Sartle.com Thor, Zeus & Jasper
Embark Arts offers exhibition opportunities to graduate students of the Fine Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. We provide a space for an engaged community of artists, curators and scholars, and we aim to expand the audience for up and coming contemporary art. A non-profit gallery, Embark’s programming represents the diversity of the talented artists studying at eight local artinstitutions: San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Mills College, San Francisco State University, UC Davis, San Jose State University, and Stanford. The juried exhibitions are held at our gallery in San Francisco at the historic Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.
Tania Houtzager || Executive Director Angelica Jardini || Curatorial Director