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WHEN:
Thru April 16, 2022
Thursdays & Fridays: 1-5pm
Saturdays: 12-4pm
WHERE:
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
688 N Milwaukee Ave
#101, Chicago, Illinois
TICKETS:
FREE, Appointment Required
For reservations, visit the Weinberg/Newton Gallery website.
To visit the gallery outside of the gallery hours, email info@weinbergnewtongallery.com
Weinberg/Newton Gallery, a non-commercial gallery dedicated to promoting social justice causes, with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, presents Human/Nature. Addressing the urgent issue of climate change, Human/Nature features new work by artists Laura Ball, Stas Bartnikas, Donovan Quintero, Obvious, Karen Reimer, Matthew Ritchie and Regan Rosburg along with video interviews from climate scientists and experts, offering actionable ideas on ways to contribute to a sustainable future.
Human/Nature is guest-curated by Cyndi Conn, founder and president of Launch Projects LLC and board member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, originator and keeper of the Doomsday Clock, which presents a reminder of the perils humans must address to survive on the planet.
Human/Nature aims to help visitors understand their agency in addressing climate change—locally, nationally, and internationally— to motivate audiences to be engaged, involved, and determined to help turn back the hand of the Doomsday Clock. On the occasion of the Doomsday Clock’s 75th anniversary, the aforementioned artists conceptualize the immediate and future environmental impact of climate change through a variety of media and visual tactics, ranging from photography, digital projections, multi-media installations and AI-generated imagery to textiles and watercolor paintings. Details of the featured works are described by the project’s spokesperson as follows:
In a collaborative multi-media installation by French collective Obvious and Russian photographer Stas Bartnikas, the Doomsday Clock is reimagined in visual form by compiling images taken by Bartnikas during his travels to remote locations on earth and combining them with an AI-generated background and the most recognizable elements of the clock. Obvious and Bartnikas’s take on the Doomsday Clock offers a new way to conceptualize the greatest challenges humanity faces and the urgency in solving them.
New York-based artist Matthew Ritchie’s original work on paper and vinyl wall installation translates the premise of the Doomsday Clock into a Life Clock. Ritchie’s piece serves as a way for audiences to collectively imagine a positive future—one based on the cumulative effects of knowable and actionable climate solutions and policies.
In the photographic work of Donovan Quintero, a member of the Navajo Nation, former U.S. Navy SEAL and a photojournalist for the Navajo Times, the devastating effects of extreme drought, wildfires, mining spills and economic inequality that continue to plague his native homeland are poignantly captured.
Slider images -- Works by Donovan Quintero
Denver-based interdisciplinary artist Regan Rosburg’s site-specific installation Monument both literally and figuratively addresses humanity’s position in the long arc of time on this planet. In Rosburg’s installation, man-made material such as plastic—which can go thousands of years without disintegrating, is juxtaposed with moss—an organism which has withstood 350 million years of earth’s history. Monument shows viewers that clues to solving the global climate crisis may lie with the ancient species still around today.
Chicago-based Karen Reimer’s colorful, seemingly abstract quilts and embroidered textile pieces reference data visualizations and scientific graphs plotting heat waves, droughts and the long-lasting effects of other environmental disasters. Using found textiles and fabrics, Reimer’s works are the result of a repeated process of patching together disparate elements, dyeing, redyeing, tearing, and resewing—perhaps a meditation on the notion of reuse.
Slider images: Works by Karen Reimer
While San-Diego based artist Laura Ball’s intricate watercolor paintings depicting entangled creatures may seem whimsical and lighthearted at first, they depict brief moments of constriction, ensnarement, death, and decay, reminding the viewer that human beings are still members of the animal kingdom, and like any living being, their existence and actions (or inactions) have impactful consequences on the rest of the natural world. The primal, natural world is an interconnected whole more valuable than the sum of its parts. Ball’s work highlights the tensions and recurring failures in humanity’s stewardship of nature.
For more information visit the Weinberg/Newton Gallery website.
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Images courtesy of Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago, IL. Photography by Evan Jenkins.
