PROJECT 17: Ritual Geography

ZEPHYR GALLERY

PROJECT

17

RITUAL Geography

April 7 - May 20, 2017

Checklist Mary Carothers

A Place Between, 2017 Wood, rope, sand Dimensions variable, boat 12’ x 6’

Sarah McCartt-Jackson Animals, 2017 Halocline, 2017 Sound, 2017 From the series Rinconada Poem, vinyl

Joyce Ogden

Heaven and Earth, 2016 Indiana soil on plate glass, steel, cord 96” x 60” x 1” Mound Calendar (elements), 2016-2017 Indiana soil, rusted steel 35” x 35” x 1.5” Mound Calendar (lunar), 2017 Cherry wood table on casters, Indiana soil, polyurethane casting resin, nut shell, zirconium dioxide, cherry tree sap, robin’s egg, flower, strawberry, deer antler, rye, corn, bird skull, black iron oxide 36” x 96” x 32” Table fabrication by Jake Ford and Jesse Gibbs China Earth: Summer Palace 5.12.16, 2016 Soil from the Summer Palace, Beijing, China 17.5” x 17.5” China Earth: Guilin 5.18.16, 2016 Soil from the base of the Guilin Mountains along the Li River, Guilin, China 17.5” x 17.5” China Earth: Great Wall 5.21.16, 2016 Soil from a watchtower of the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall, Luanping County, China 17.5” x 17.5” Indiana Earth, 2011 Soil from Georgetown, Indiana, USA 20” x 16” Dilla, 2016 A. graveolens, hemp cord 30” x 30” x 36”

Adrienne Miller

maintaining the overgrowth, 2017 man-made islands, 2017 property line, 2017 upstairs/downstairs, 2017 Acrylic gouache and colored pencil on mylar 40” x 25” each

Gathering, 2015-2017 Repurposed science lab flasks, bees wax, steel.

August 2015: Cherry Tomato September 2015: Goldenrod October 2015: Thistle November 2015: Viburnum Leaf December 2015: Winterberry January 2016: Snow February 2016: Daffodil buds March 2016: Redbud flowers April 2016: Plant stem May 2016: Comfrey flowers June 2016: Honeysuckle vine July 2016: Dill crow

25” x 21” x 2”

RITUAL Geography “A ritual geography exploited the symbolic value of the rhythms of everyday life—going to and returning from the sea, the cycles of the seasons or of birth and death...”

—Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, 1984

The land and sea both influence and are shaped by human activity—this is the premise of human geography. The artists in this exhibition, all women, employ the land and sea as medium, subject, and symbol to evoke nature, memory, and our constructed spaces and boundaries.

Joyce Ogden’s work deals most directly with the very substance of the land, from the dirt under her feet to the plants she grows in her garden. Cultivation of the land is the most fundamental of human rituals. Imbued with a sentimentality for the waning ways of life that connect us to the land, Ogden’s works honor the landscapes, rituals, and fecundity of nature.

Mary Carothers’ installation was inspired by her own travels to the Outer Hebrides Islands to trace a female ancestor who entered the United States undocumented during the Civil War. A Place Between is a subtle tribute to Carothers’ ancestor and to all immigrants—a skeletal memento of migration journeys. The knots, a collaboration with the Kentucky Refugee Ministry, are the ties that bind us to our roots and to one another, while rope provides a tense connection between past, present, and future.

Sarah McCartt-Jackson’s visualized poems literally become maps. McCartt-Jackson’s recent work focuses on the unheard voices of women who experience abuse by creating a landscape of psychological spaces. She invites people to “participate in the geography of grammar, the mapping of our language, and, simultaneously, to experience the point at which these linguistic systems become shared human expression.”

MCartt-Jackson was inspired, in part, by Adrienne Miller’s use of angles and texture, as well as Miller’s focus on the capacity of landscape and abstract spaces to express human emotion. Miller’s human geography is that of constructed spaces and the intimacy of our interior lives. Using suggestive details such as plants, ladders, fences, shadows, or roof lines, her drawings evoke the most private home environments where we internalize and process the world around us.

The work in this exhibition is particularly poignant at this moment in American history. Women have historically had so little agency in shaping the land—from owning land, to governing its use, to deciding their location upon it—that the exhibition acts as a corrective measure. As artists, these women own their environments. Through the physical world, they create spaces, cultivate land, traverse boundaries, overcome oppression, and deploy the symbolic power of nature.

-Eileen Yanoviak, 2017

Sarah McCartt-Jackson Halocline, 2017

Adrienne Miller

upstairs/downstairs, 2017

Joyce Ogden

Mound Calader (lunar) (detail), 2017

Artist Biographies

Mary Carothers (b. 1967 in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, lives in Louisville, Kentucky)

For Mary Carothers, nature and culture are inextricably linked. Her works are often site-specific, using a socially engaged process as a way to bridge memory and identity with a specific place or group of people.

Carothers’ collaborative project, The Frozen Car (2008) was featured on the Discovery Channel, Floating Seeds (2013), juried by COD+A (Commission of Design and Architecture), received an international merit award, and most recently, her sculptural commission Beneath the Surface was recognized by Americans for the Arts as one of 38 most outstanding public art projects created in 2015. Carothers received her BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY and her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She has been a professor at Hite Art Institute, Louisville, Kentucky for 18 years.

Sarah McCartt-Jackson (b. 1982 in Lexington, Kentucky, lives in Louisville, Kentucky)

Kentucky poet, folklorist, and naturalist Sarah McCartt-Jackson has been published by and received honors from the Kentucky Arts Council, Copper Nickel, Bellingham Review, The Fourth River, Indiana Review, Journal of American Folklore, and others. She has served as artist-in-residence for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and for the Cabin at Shotpouch Creek through Oregon State University. She is the author of two chapbooks, Vein of Stone and Children Born on the Wrong Side of the River, which won the 2015 Mary Ballard Poetry Prize.

Adrienne Miller (b. 1984 in Memphis, Tennessee, lives in Louisville, Kentucky)

Adrienne Miller creates works on paper that explore the way we view the land around us, both the natural landscape and constructed spaces. Since graduating with her BFA from Murray State University in 2007, Miller has served as Studio Manager and Gallery Coordinator for Vanderbilt University’s Department of Art, Exhibitions Assistant for the Northern Illinois University Art Museum, Preparator for the Speed Museum, Staff Intern at Spudnik Press, Printmaking Curator for the 2014 Chicago Printer’s Ball, and Workshop Assistant for the 2014 Frogman’s Print and Paper Workshop. Miller graduated with her MFA in Printmaking from Northern Illinois University in 2015. She teaches drawing and printmaking classes and is currently the Exhibitions and Project Coordinator at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. Her studio work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions across the U.S. and abroad.

Joyce Ogden (b. 1964 in New York City, lives in Georgetown, Indiana)

Based in Southern Indiana, Joyce Ogden’s work explores the human relationship to nature, time, and space.

Ogden received an MFA from the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University, Bloomington and a BFA from the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville. She has exhibited throughout the southeast, including: Carnegie Center for Art and History, New Albany, Indiana; Morlan Gallery, Transylvania University; Barr Gallery, Indiana University Southeast ; Cressman Center for the Visual Arts, University of Louisville; the Speed Art Museum; and the Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, among others. Ogden has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards that include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant Program.

She is a founding member of ENID, a Louisville-based women sculptors organization. Ogden is Professor of Art at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.

Curator Biography

Eileen Yanoviak (b. 1982 in Weatherford, Texas, lives in Louisville, Kentucky)

Eileen Yanoviak is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Louisville. Her research concentrates on human interaction with nature throughout art history. She is a contributor to Burnaway: The Voice for Art in the South, and she recently served as essayist and editor for the 2016 Speed Art Museum exhibition catalogue Gaela Erwin: Reframing the Past and co-editor for a 2016 collection of essays Formations of Identity: Society, Politics, and Landscape. She has worked in museums including the Arkansas Arts Center, Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, and the Speed Art Museum for the past fifteen years in a variety of capacities from curatorial to education and development. She is currently Adjunct Faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Membership Manager at the Speed Art Museum.

Zephyr Gallery Artist Partners

Artist Board

Patrick Donley Ken Hayden Peggy Sue Howard Chris Radtke

Matt Meers Robert Mitchell Joel Pinkerton Reba Rye

PROJECT 17: Ritual Geography Eileen Yanoviak Jessica Oberdick Robert Mitchell Chris Radtke Peggy Sue Howard Patrick Donley

Curator Project Manager Graphic Design Exhibition Co-Coordinator Exhibition Co-Coordinator Exhibition Preparator Image Credit

Cover Image: Mary Carothers: A Place Between, (detail), 2017

The mission of Zephyr Gallery is to serve as a platform to incubate, advocate, and facilitate innovative ideas in art and artistic practices in the region. In 2014, Zephyr launched an ongoing Project series with curated proposal-based exhibitions as well as collaborations with universities, colleges, and cultural institutions.

Project 17: Ritual Geography is the seventeenth exhibition in this series.

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G A L L E R Y 610 East Market Street | Louisville, KY 40202 www.zephyrgallery.org | Thursday–Saturday, 11–6