Showing the Invisible: LandLab Gallery Show Opens at Schuylkill Center
September 2, 2014
PHILADELPHIA - On September 27 at the University of Nature conference, the Schuylkill Center will officially open its newest gallery show, Process & Progress. The opening, at 4 pm, celebratesthe midway checkpoint for the LandLab environmental art residency announced earlier this year. The residency, one of only handful of its kind in the country, pushes the cutting edge of environmental art, asking that the artists create independent works that also educate the public and remediate local ecological issues.
Since being awarded the residencies in May, the LandLab artists have been investigating, engaging, and creating as they explore their installations. This gallery exhibition will showcase not only their work so far, but that other, often more hidden element: the artistic process itself. The show will include past artworks from the LandLab residents that show the trajectory of their practice in environmental art and contextualizes their current work. But it will also feature what the artists have done so far with their LandLab residencies, what their early explorations have revealed, and where they intend to push their work.
In environmental art, the process is often as important as the outcome itself; the remedial, social, and educational dimensions are given equal weight to the aesthetics, and the final piece is just one component of the entire artistic work. In revealing this process through the gallery show, the Schuylkill Center invite audiences to be more deeply a part of this work, making visible a part of art often left to the wayside.
For some of the resident artists, include B. H. Mills, Maggie Mills, and Marguerita Hagan, the show will explore how they developed the plans for their completed LandLab Native Pollinator Garden, a living site-specific work that was unveiled in July. For others, like WE THE WEEDS artist-botanist duo, the show will be an opportunity to see a work-in-progress, while for artists Jake Beckman and Leslie Birch, Process & Progress offers a chance to see the creative planning and researching process in action. Process & Progress will not be the last chance for the public to see this process as it develops: in spring 2015, the Center for Emerging Visual Artists will host a show in their gallery in Center City documenting the completed residencies, from start to finish.
Join the Schuylkill Center on Saturday, September 27, at 4 pm for the opening reception of Process & Progress.
