Marginal Green Works by Stella Brown, Ellie Irons, Jaclyn Jacunski, and Jenny Kendler Curated by Elizabeth Lalley
Marginal Green Elizabeth Lalley
Artists Stella Brown, Jaclyn Jacunski, Jenny Kendler, and Ellie Irons examine the built environment through margins of open land, searching for new forms of knowledge in green spaces that appear neglected or overgrown. Their work moves beyond the study of architecture or urban infrastructure to expose the patchy, shifting nature of urban space, revealing ecological resilience and intelligence in “marginal green” spaces such as abandoned lots and the city’s weedy interstices. Through research, site-responsive practices, and fieldwork, each artist confronts the rapid shaping of landscape under capitalist structures, wherein “land” is typically seen as valuable commodity and unplanned flora as pest or blight. In their works, elusive, living features of the built environment are brought to the fore, and through them, we witness the collision of ecological instability with strategies for survival in a landscape that is continually being made and remade. In her series Lay of the Land, Jaclyn Jacunski undercuts the idea of land seen solely as a financial instrument by researching sites in the urban landscape that we typically read in terms of negation (non-functioning, empty, undeveloped) and exploring them as active traces of the land’s shifting histories and psychological structures. Lifting forms and symbols like fences and flags to explore their impressions on the spaces around them, Jacunski asserts the material presence and agency of land and landscape precisely at those points when the absence of formal urban structures falsely suggests voids. The iconography of Jacunski’s work in Marginal Green is sourced from alleys, overgrown spaces, and the urban edges of Chicago’s Garfield Park neighborhood, which Jacunski has explored through walks and observations of the landscape that probe alternative systems of knowledge and experience that are rooted in the land itself. These explorations engage marginal sites like vacant lots and contaminated brownfields that
are often overgrown with “weeds,” including native prairie plants that Jacunski harvests and blends into paper, likewise mixing soil into ink, for her Colorfields prints. Growing in areas of high contamination, the plants Jacunski sources actively absorb toxins from the soil through the process of phytoremediation. Jacunski also uses this material in her woven rug Body Tracks (whose title nods to eco-feminist artist Ana Mendieta), a piece that invites us to tread an earthy path within the gallery as if it were a shortcut beaten down through the undergrowth. Gradually, the dried, braided grasses will
Jaclyn Jacunski, Colorfields, 2015, paper made from phytoremediator, native prairie plants collected from six brownfield sites in the west side of Chicago, inks made from soil and clay pigment from the sites, 17” x 23”
be worn down and dispersed across the floor as viewers move in and out of Jacunski’s Site Device—an installation consisting of a camera obscura that engages the gallery’s windows and the urban space beyond them. Jacunski’s piece asks viewers to meditate on an outside space that appears neglected and overgrown; inside the gallery, the image of the “real” site is distorted, as the camera obscura inverts, stretches, and re-spatializes those glimpses of the East Garfield Park neighborhood within the interior walls of the gallery itself. This enveloping and ephemeral scene exists as a projection in flux, dependent on the presence of light and the way viewers’ eyes adjust to it, all of which casts landscape and vision as a slowly unfolding exchange.
that altered landscape. Here, neat distinctions between “native” and “invasive” plants are thrown into question. Irons advances these concerns in her ongoing Invasive Pigments project. Collecting plants like the Asiatic dayflower, pokeweed, Oriental bittersweet, Morrow’s honeysuckle and other plants from the surrounding cityscape, Irons mines their natural pigments and uses them to create multihued botanical grids and charts that meditate on the variation of urban plant life. She also draws maps that trace the migration patterns of certain plant species and show their concentrations within urban centers as a result of global trade exchanges. In these pieces, bright swatches and spots of natural pigment soften the formal order of grids and maps or defy them altogether, just as furtive natural growth blurs the hard lines of city planning. The alteration of landscape, and the loss of species, habitat, biodiversity, and open space those changes often inflict, permeates the work of Jenny Kendler. Kendler’s research-driven practice explores how we might reattach ourselves to the sensuous natural world around us, even amid the structures of urban life. In Marginal Green, Kendler presents a study for Garden for a Changing Climate, which, beginning in the spring of 2018, will exist as a larger mobile public art project and event series taking place throughout Chicago.
Ellie Irons’ practice likewise confronts questions of value and our perception of urban landscape by recasting weedy urban plants as active agents in an ever-changing landscape. Irons suggests that rather than questioning whether or not a weed “naturally” belongs where it’s found, a more productive task is to ask how a weed manages to survive within changing ecological contexts, and what its survival reveals about
*Left: Ellie Irons, Dot Cluster/ Wild Plants Common in New York City (detail), 2016, graphite and plant pigments on paper, 19”x 24” *Right: Jenny Kendler, study for “Garden for a Changing Climate”, mixed media, 2017
Kendler’s prototype is constructed from two reclaimed wooden planters oriented along the gallery’s north/south axis and connected to a pulley system with salvaged arborist’s rope. The planters contain wild urban plants Kendler collected from overgrown, unbuilt lots in East Garfield Park; throughout the course of the exhibition, the planters will be incrementally pulled across the gallery, from south to north, a trajectory that traces the directional push that occurs when global warming and shifting ecozones disrupt a plant species’ normal growth patterns Just as Irons adopts a “weed’s eye view” to consider complicated assemblages of life and land, Kendler, too, turns to the perspective of plants—the landscape’s seasonal timekeepers, their tissues rooted in soil—as a way to better understand our altered, and increasingly precarious, global ecosystem. In Kendler’s installation, the slow and dispersed threat of a global warming is enacted on an intimate scale, with microgardens, like pockets of unbuilt land, demonstrating the flux of a rapidly changing landscape.
Like a natural historian for the Anthropocene, Stella Brown studies the built environment as an assemblage of both natural and human-made features. Through her research and field work, Brown unearths the landscape’s layered histories and the material traces of its various
functions, both planned and unintentional. For Marginal Green, Brown drew upon fieldwork she conducted in a 62-acre swath of land near the Chicago River known as “Rezkoville.” When Brown was forced to abruptly end her research there (the site was razed in preparation for the construction of a high-density housing, office, and retail development project that will be called Riverline), her project took another turn. Rather than representing the landscape as it now stands, Brown’s Rezkoville Visitors Center instead represents a lost place, a wilderness complexly woven into the commerce of urban land development. On display are relics that speak to the social and natural histories and chance ecologies within a site that appeared to many as nothing more than an empty city lot. Brown does not frame this landscape for us in cohesive, pictorial form. Instead, her project, along with its fellow works in Marginal Green, situates viewers alongside the urban landscape’s marginal, living elements. The role of naturalist becomes our own, prompting us to read the landscape more carefully, to witness its material changes, and to recognize the resilience of natural systems that exist and even thrive within environments of constant disruption.
*Left: Stella Brown, Birds of Rezkoville: Vireo Warbler, Redwing Blackbird, Goldfinch, gouache on paper, 2017 *Right: Stella Brown, Common Trees of Rezkoville: Box Elder, Cottonwood, Smooth Sumac, White Mulberry, American Elm, gouache on paper, 2017
Ellie Irons, Invasive Pigments Color Sampler, 2012-13, plexiglass, deep well slides, plant-derived pigments in gum arabic, 14.5� x 14.5�
Exhibition dates: June 17 – July 22, 2017 Gallery hours: Saturdays 12–4 pm and by appointment
GOLDFINCH 319 N. ALBANY CHICAGO, IL
h t t p : / / g o l d f i n c h g a l l e r y. o r g / *Cover: Stella Brown, Rattlesnake Master (Eryngium yucciflium) plant, 2016, papier mache, acrylic paint, wood
Design by Nicole Gardner