Art Gallery Area 49

Art History Online -  Final Exam

Gallery Area 49

About Us
Area 49 is located in Calimesa, California and is curated by Britt Hohner-Worthington. It is our vision to showcase unconventional art forms, making less familiar concepts of art available to a broader audience.

The "Earth Matters" Exhibition

"Environmental art" is a rather broad term that encompasses a variety of artistic expressions. The concept of environmental art emerged as a movement pioneered by a group of artists in the 1960, some of them featured in this exhibition.

This new approach to art first emerged in form of land-art or "site-specific" art which involves the sculpting of the landscape, sometimes on a monumental scale. The surface of the Earth becomes a three-dimensional canvas which the artist re-shapes and re-creates.

A different form of site-specific art is created by leaving the natural environment intact. Many environmental artists active in nature conservation work only with "indigenous" materials found on-site; the artwork is created as part of the natural environment which is left unharmed, expressing a desire for a closer and more harmonious relationship with what we call nature.

Yet another expression of environmental art is closely related to environmental activism and conservationism. Here, environmental art becomes "action art"; the objective is to bring attention to environmental or social causes, generate interest and awareness and to provoke public response.

The various concepts and aspects of this intriguing form of art are represented in this exhibition by a group of renowned artists who have worked and exhibited extensively in the field of environmental art. 

"Earth Matters" features the following artists:

Jackie Brookner
Agnes Denes
Andy Goldsworthy
Nancy Holt
Chris Jordan
Richard Long
Michael Heizer
Alan Sonfist
Jason deCaires Taylor
James Turrell

"Prima Lingua" by Jackie Brookner

Media: Concrete, volcanic rock, mosses, ferns, wetland plants, fish, steel

Dimensions: 64 by 101 by 80 in.

Date: 1996-2002

Born in 1945 in Providence, Rhode Island, Jackie Brookner was pursuing a PhD in Art History, but turned to a career in art, particularly sculpture, in 1971. Early on in her career as an artist she became fascinated with the relationship between moving water and biological processes and was increasingly driven to combine art with environmental awareness. As an environmental artist, Brookner specializes in turning waste water reclamation into public works of art and in raising awareness of the condition of public water systems.

She has created landscape-scale artwork involving urban biospheres; however, Brookner is best known for her living artwork that is both biological and functional in nature. Her unique "biosculpture" "Prima Lingua" is a biological microcosm and water filtration system in form of a giant tongue, designed to showcase natural water regeneration processes. "It's almost like a totem to have that kind of power to stimulate the human forces, the human will, to want to pay attention to our connection to water," she says. "The fact that we are water -- we're 75 percent to 80 percent water, depending on how old you are -- every living thing is water, so water is the thing that really links us all."

Artist's website:
http://www.jackiebrookner.com/

"Wheatfield: A Confrontation" by Agnes Denes

Media: Wheat

Dimensions: Two acres

Date:1982

Agnes Denes was born in Hungary in 1931, moved to Sweden and eventually came to the United States. Denes pioneered a unique interdisciplinary approach to the concept of art, exploring interactions of physical and social sciences with different artforms. She has shown her art in more than 450 exhibitions worldwide and has won a number of awards from institutions such as the Carnegie Mellon University and MIT. She holds several honorary doctorates. Considered one of the founders of the environmental art movement, she is best known for her monumental and often controversial land-art projects.

For her work :Wheatfield: A Confrontation", Denes harvested 1000 pounds of wheat from a field she had planted on two acres of land fill near downtown Manhattan, and planted seeds from the harvest in different regions around the world. Denes commented on her artwork: "Food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger, and ecological issues".

Artist's website
http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com/index.html

"Balancing Rock Misty" by Andy Goldsworthy

Media: cibachrome photograph

Dimensions: 10 by 15.5 in.

Date: June 1979

Andy Goldsworthy was born in Chesire, UK, in 1956. He attended Bradford Art College (1974-1975) and received his Bachelor of Arts from Preston Polytechnic (1975-1978). He has won awards from the Scottish Art Council and received a honorary degree from the University of Bradford. A documentary about Goldsworthy's life and career ("Rivers and Tides") was filmed in 2001.

Goldsworthy creates his projects on-site and integrates his artwork into the structure of the site. Changes and decay caused by natural processes are part of the artwork. Also part of the creative process is the documentation of the project by means of photography. His philosophies are expressed in his work "Balancing Rock Misty", created in Langdale, Cumbria, UK, in 1979. " Each work grows, strays, decays—integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit."

Artist's website:
http://www.ucblueash.edu/artcomm/web/w2005_2006/maria_Goldsworthy/TEST/index.html

"Sun Tunnels" by Nancy Holt

Media: Concrete

Dimensions: 26 m long

Date:  1973-1976

Nancy Holt was born in 1938 in Worcester, Massachussetts and graduated from Tufts University in Medford. Holt started her artistic career as a photographer, but is most noted for her monumental land-art and environmental projects. She married environmental artist Robert Smithon in 1963. Holt's fascination with land-art came from a desire to change how art is viewed and perceived. Due to its scale, a visitor does not just view land-art, but is surrounded by it and becomes part of it. In her projects, she focuses on the perception of surroundings in relationship to the passage of time. She tries to tie into this construct a "connection between the Earth and its place in the solar system and the universe".

These concepts are present in her "Sun Tunnels" in the Great Basin Desert in Utah. Each tunnel is aligned differently in respect to time of day, as well as summer/winter solstices, creating different interactions between the artwork and the natural light. According to Holt, "it’s an inversion of the sky/ground relationship-bringing the sky down to the Earth."

Nancy Holt at the Graham Foundation
"http://www.grahamfoundation.org/grantees/3611-nancy-holt-sightlines

"Plastic Bottles" by Chris Jordan

Media: photographic inkjet print

Dimensions: 60 by 120 in.

Date: 2007

Chris Jordan was born (1963) and raised in Connecticut. He graduated from law school and practiced corporate law for ten years, but eventually left the legal profession in order to pursue his passion and embark on a career as a photographer and visual artist.

His photo collage "plastic bottles" from 2007 shows a mass of two million plastic bottles, which is the amount of bottles discarded every 5 minutes in the United States. Jordan sees his artwork as a comment on the culture of mindless consumption and destruction of resources prevalent in modern society. In his own words: "As an American consumer myself, I'm in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry."

Artist's website:
www.chrisjordan.com