April 24 - May 31, 2008
Lawrimore Project is pleased to present its first one-person exhibition by Seattle artist, Susan Robb. The Challenge Nature Provides will include recent video, photographs and sculpture that continue Robb’s interrogation of the complicated relationship between culture, nature and the environment.
Utilizing such diverse materials as polyethylene, stainless steel, Plexiglas, crystals the artist has grown, fire and human waste (including the dealer’s), Robb’s new works are ideological hybrids of flesh, nature and technology impelled by the American landscape. The multi-sided question, “where are we in nature?” has been at the core of Robb’s inquiries throughout her 15-year career. The current wave of green-washing and ecoism aside, and as this new body of work proves, Robb’s work is eternal, open-ended and poetic. Like others who came before her and felt a deep connection to the land: Neruda, Fuller, De Maria, and Mowat, Robb’s new works are all poetry and power. If green is the new black, and eco-art de rigueur, Robb’s work recoils in horror at this recent selling of the environment and pushes back on these notions to dramatic, sometimes tragic, and always singular ends.
IN THE MAIN SPACE
Nowhere are the above ideas made more evident than in the three large sculptures in the Main Space that form the conceptual backbone of the exhibition. Using Walter De Maria’s Lighting Rods, the Animals Stage a Valiant Surrender, as the title suggests, imagines a scenario wherein, fed up with humankind, animals have claimed an element from Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, 1977 and repurposed it to support a surrender flag fashioned from their own feathers, hides and fur. The flag, violently thrust into a pile of crystalline rocks Robb fabricated from colored and mirrored acrylic, not only addresses the obvious ecological crisis we currently face, but also narrates a profound understanding of courage and the act of giving into one’s fears.
Digester uses the logic of reverse engineering to bring the viewer back to the origins of culture—back to the hearth—back to a place where we can re-create, re-invent and re-imagine a future in balance. Six 55-gallon drums engineered to produce methane from human waste will be used to fuel a simple campfire. Akin to Superflex’s Biogas project as realized in The Land, Robb ups the ante and changes the conceptual stakes by using her art dealer’s effluent as fuel. Utilizing the waste of someone who, it can be argued, trades in one of our highest forms of culture, Robb makes manifest the gallery’s role as a meeting place for ideas, shared experience and as a proposed site for encouraging enlightenment. Like the archetypical notion of the hearth, this communal, self-sustaining campfire appeals for the creation of a more imaginative, more personal and intimate relationship with nature and asks the viewer to take part in a dialogue that could possibly bring about a shift in our cultural, political and ecological future.
The four-channel audio installation Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment is included in the exhibition precisely because of its thematic relationship to Robb’s newer work, especially the notion of hybridization. Signal transduction is the means plants use to communicate to themselves information about their environment so they can make any necessary changes or adaptations. This piece is an imagined amplification of that communication and highlights another one of Robb’s strengths, making visible that which is imperceptible. With it’s heavily layered and processed whispering audio track repeating, "It's in the air. It's in the water," Robb takes us to a place that is somehow both lyrical and unsettling.
IN THE WHITE CUBE
Like lost pages from Pablo Neruda’s Stones of the Sky, Robb’s new gem-like sculptures Racing Towards Hardness is a Kind of Softness and The Gentlest Gesture are flowering Sakura branches made from cultured crystals, circuit boards, and muscle wire. Taking Neruda’s line, “Everything is racing towards hardness,” as a cue, her crystal encrusted branches and flower blossoms, at once robotic and precious, are presented as both life and death, as technological advance and evolutionary inevitability, as movement away from the softness and decay of flesh and towards the solidity and purity of rock.
Recognizing how American cultural identity is in part created by our feelings about the natural landscape and that these feelings are imbued with inherent contradiction; that American nature is a spiritual and physical void which needs to conquered and civilized through technology and scientific order , and that nature is sublime and God is inherent in this very land, Robb created We Are Coming, We Are Coming, Wait Up Stones! (Terra-formations 1 - 3). Produced with aerial photographs of geological formations taken by the artist that are then split, mirrored and bookmatched into new compositions, this work acts as an abstract visual bridge between the three sculptures in the Main Space. It uses our visual understanding of the American landscape as translated though such diverse methods as zone-system photography, military aerial photography, and strip mining, as well as our biological endowed understanding of visual information as bilaterally symmetric beings. We Are Coming… wryly posits a new terra formed earth, though unlike what we have been engaging in the past 100 or so years, to create a landmass/animal hybrid, endowed with one of the simplest of all shared commonalities, bilateral symmetry; that which elicits a response in us that says, ”living being”. Bilateral symmetry is a formal sub-theme throughout the works in the show and is a common thread in Robb’s work in general. It is one of the most common ways of understanding the world and what is sentient in it. After all, the only animal that isn’t symmetrical is the sponge. As Robb explains it, “and who wants to be a sponge?”
IN THE HALL
The title for Robb’s exhibition comes from two recent photographs, The Challenge Nature Provides 1 and 2. For Robb, the challenge is to understand ourselves as dualistic creatures that are endowed with conscience yet mysteriously still animal. We resist animalistic impulse at one turn, while embracing it at another. We challenge our own human nature and also submit to it. The seemingly illicit poses and ambiguously violent actions depicted in the photographs beg the questions: What is our relationship with nature? Is the violence welcomed, reciprocal and warranted? Is it resignation or domination? The violent and submissive elements of these works also relate to the notion of “valiant surrender” found in the sculpture, Using De Maria… discussed earlier.
IN THE BLACK BOX
We are pleased to present the video of Robb's outdoor, plein aire performative sculpture, Warmth, Giant Black Toobs.
BACKGROUND
More than a billion tons of trash is dumped into the ocean every year. According to an article in Best Life Magazine, oceanographers have found a swirling miasma of consumer plastics—plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic toys—the size of Texas in the pacific ocean. Plankton, fish, birds, and marine mammals all ingest these plastics (and the chemicals they contain and leach), which in turn we ingest. Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with biochemistry, uncovering how plastics not only effect planetary health but are also linked to cancer, diabetes, and endocrine malfunctions. Like Andy Warhol said, we are indeed (and literally) all becoming plastic.
In Warmth, Giant Black Toobs, Robb uses solar power and ambient breezes to give life to the ever-present black plastic garbage bag. Polypropylene garbage bags, 50 feet tall by 30 inches in diameter, are inflated with air by allowing the wind to fill them or by running with them. One end is staked to the ground; the other end is free. The sun does the rest. Employing a similar principle to that of hot air balloons, the sun heats the air inside the Toobs, and since hot air is less dense then cold air, the Toobs become buoyant.
Solar-produced buoyancy, breezes, and internal convection work to transform this symbol of the (American) cycle of consumption and waste into seemingly sentient creatures, live plastic hybrids whose choreography brings to mind the very sea creatures our epoch’s mass of waste affects.
ALSO
We are offering you an opportunity to do some guerrilla gardening with Seed Bombs, signed packages of seed balls made of soil and wildflower seeds native to Pacific Northwest. Terra forming can be ours, even if it’s on a small scale. Robb intends for you throw Seed Bombs into derelict lots and abandoned spaces. Hardy wildflowers sprout and grow. The plants attract birds, butterflies, and hummingbirds…
You’ve changed the face of your neighborhood. See, we still have a little power.
BIOGRAPHY
Susan Robb received her BA in Art History and a BFA in Photography from Syracuse University in New York. She received her MFA from the University of Washington. Robb has been awarded a Pollock Krasner Fellowship; the first Stranger Genius Award; an Artist Trust Fellowship; and most recently a Performance Network Grant for WARMTH GIANT BLACK TOOBS. Her work has been featured in Leonardo; Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technolog; Aesthetics and Visualization in Chemistry; HYLE; International Journal for the Philosophy of Chemistry; Rivet Magazine; Arcade; Architecture and Design in the Northwest; and in Art et Biotechnologies, Presses de l’Universite du Quebec. Her work is included in various collections including the Joseph and Eileen Monsen collection and the Microsoft Collection. She is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Washington. This summer, WARMTH GIANT BLACK TOOBS will go on tour to museums, institutions and venues in Texas, New Jersey, New York, Hawaii, Montana and elsewhere.
Read reviews:
Robert Wade’s opening night photos
