Robert C Beck and Sarah Max Beck, In Addition to Permission Electric Lifesaver Dino Blood II (2017)
Join us via Zoom Sunday, May 17 at 4 PM EST for Material Worlds, a panel discussion featuring five artists exhibiting pieces at "Owning Earth," opening this fall in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts.
Our panel will feature artists Alex Young, Matthew Friday, Brooke Singer, Colin Lyons, and Robert C Beck. They will discuss the ways their proposals for Owning Earth explore the connections between art and science, and complicate popular solutions to existing environmental challenges. The panel will be facilitated by Tal Beery.
About Owning Earth
Owning Earth is an ambitious, two-year outdoor exhibition in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts. It will help bring critical attention to an emerging movement of creative practitioners undertaking outdoor installations and land-based projects that problematize notions of control, confront systems of domination, and prepare the soil for futures guided by mutuality and reverence.
More info:
https://www.unisonarts.org/owning-earth
About the Speakers:
Alex Young
Alex Young is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator who explores both humans and other-than-humans collaborative shaping of their environments. Presently, Young’s work explores ruderal futures—or speculative forms of co-creation with species best adapted to thrive in environments distressed by human activity. Young’s projects have been presented at Conflux Festival, Flux Factory, Kiasma Museum, ACC Galerie Weimar, Stadtische Museen Zittau, Spanien 19C, San Diego Art Institute, Beyond/In Western New York Biennial, UB Art Gallery, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and more. Recent curatorial and editorial projects include GROPING in the DARK (MOCA Tucson) and Ecology of Bad Ideas (Drain Magazine).
Matthew Friday
Matthew Friday is an educator and transdisciplinary artist who develops apparatuses and systems that examine and provoke new political ecologies. He has spoken internationally about ecology, aesthetics and politics at venues such as NYU and the Rubin Foundation. His essays have appeared in October, the Journal of Modern Craft, the Journal Aesthetics and Protest, and the Brooklyn Rail. He is an active member of the ecosystem research and design collective SPURSE. He has exhibited at Wave Hill, MassMOCA, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Grand Arts, White Columns, Bemis Art Center, Kunsthal Aarhus and the BMW Guggenheim LAB.
Brooke Singer
Brooke Singer is an artist who lives in New York City. She works across science, technology, politics and arts practices. Her work provides entry into issues that are often characterized as specialized to a general public. She is Associate Professor of New Media at Purchase College, and co-founder of the former collective Preemptive Media and the current La Casita Verde in Brooklyn, NY. She has been a Designer in Residence at the New York Hall of Science and Fellow at Eyebeam Art + Technology. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as MoMA/PS1, Warhol Museum of Art, The Banff Centre, Neuberger Museum of Art, Diverseworks, Matadero Madrid. Her writing has been published in Big Data and Society, Radical History Review and Brooklyn Rail, among others. Her work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, Microsoft Corporation and Bucksbaum/Learsy.
Colin Lyons
Colin Lyons grew up in Petrolia: ‘Canada’s original oil boomtown,' which fueled his interests in industrial ruins and sacrificial landscapes. Fusing sculpture, printmaking, and site-specific installation, his works consider preservation in an age of planned obsolescence and resource depletion, and reflect on issues around geo-engineering, urban renewal and brownfield rehabilitation practices. Lyons' work has been shown in 25 solo exhibitions across Canada and the United States, as well as in group exhibitions internationally. Recent projects have been presented at Platform Stockholm (Stockholm), The Soap Factory (Minneapolis), and CIRCA art actual (Montreal). He has been the recipient of project grants from Canada Council for the Arts and The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, among others. In 2016, he was awarded the Grant Wood Fellowship in Printmaking from The University of Iowa. Lyons' projects have been featured in Art in Print, Magenta Magazine, Le Devoir, and The Globe and Mail, among others. He currently lives in Binghamton, New York, where he is an assistant professor at Binghamton University (SUNY).
Robert C Beck
Robert C Beck is a multidisciplinary visual artist working with biological media and technology to create dynamic installations of living art. He is cofounder of studioHydrostatic, a collaborative bioart research duo that has built installations for the Museum of American Glass, NJ; UrbanGlass, NYC; and Brooklyn Fire Proof, NYC. He has been awarded fellowships at Wheaton Arts, and UrbanGlass; and has exhibited his work at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, the Museum of Florida Art, and the Naples Museum of Art. He was a master printer for Flying Horse Editions before moving to Brooklyn where he is currently researching hybrid processes that combine printmaking, photography and cell culture within graphic art.