ECOTOPIA /
Painting, Photography, Glass & Ceramics
January 4 - February 26, 2022
Ecotopia looks at the leading edges in art, celebrating our environment and the interdisciplinary materials of it. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg accused the COP26 Climate Summit of consisting of a lot of “blah, blah, blah.” When we look at nature, it looks back. We must do more. Ecotopia is a voyage of clarification where art allows us to transfix our attention onto which a new kind of life has been made possible.
Photographer Nico Van Dongen creates doubt in what we see in the forests he’s depicted. Once you see his images, you must surrender to them–filter out the technical questions and step into a transition of time and space in one moment.
Painter Karen McAlister Shimoda aims with her mini abstract landscape paintings to make sense of what is only the incremental, inadequate progress to address our climate crisis.
Glass blower Jennifer Morgan manipulates the fluidity of glass combining broken and recycled glass with new glass-blown forms, putting each piece through a softened broken glass rollup process creating vessels that are both hard and fragile–much like the planet. Know that you are touching something dangerous, that embraces its flaws and not meant to be overly handled.
Ceramicist Ian Hazard-Bill makes sculptural serving vessels, thrown on the potter's wheel and then altered as they dry. His sought after expertise in the ancient art of wood firing brings out expressions of clay that transform in ways unlike any other type of kiln.