Curators / Debra Baxter, Margie Livingston, and Daria Tavoularis

Specimen: Investigating Nature

Debra Baxter
Kim Bennett
Mandy Greer
Sarah Hoffman
Margie Livingston
Ana Lois-Borzi
Margaret Meehan
Daria Tavoularis
Rachael Weinstein

November 1 – 30, 2003

Nine artists from across the country will present their explorations of the relationship between man and nature.

This exhibit's title comes from both senses of the word specimen. The first meaning–a sample used for analysis or study–describes the product of artists who are each in their own way considering nature. The study of a specimen (animal, vegetable, mineral, or idea (is a work of the mind. Each is a container of memories and obsessions, and the pieces in this exhibition promise to be very personal.

The second meaning of the word specimen–a representative of the class of things to which it belongs–addresses the nature of the work in this exhibition. Rather than ask artists to respond to the ideas surrounding nature, the curators took the approach of inviting artists who are engaged in these questions as part of their regular practice.

Specimen was co-curated by Debra Baxter, Margie Livingston, and Daria Tavoularis. Baxter and Livingston are Seattle-based. Tavoularis recently moved from Seattle to Vancouver, B.C. to attend graduate school at the University of British Columbia.

The curators–whose work will also be exhibited–invited artists to participate in hopes of establishing a dialog about how artists are using nature as a point of departure. The artists invited from across the United States include Kim Bennett (Brevard, NC), Sarah Hoffman (Minneapolis, MN), Mandy Greer (Seattle, WA), Ana Lois-Borzi (Minneapolis, MN), Margaret Meehan (Dallas, TX), and Rachael Weinstein (Providence, RI). Works will include drawing, installation, mixed media, painting, sculpture, and photography.

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Debra Baxter makes clouds from large powder puffs she sews together into a billowing white mass, a contribution to the evolving school of mundane minimalism.

She’s one of nine artists, all women, featured in an exhibit at SOIL titled “Specimen: Investigating Nature.”

Daria Tavoularis imperfectly rehabilitates wrecked things: broken ceramic coils bandaged with bits of sock, and fake rocks and boulders covered in the fabric of old sweaters. Since in her aesthetic philosophy there is no nature to save, she’s bent on saving its simulations.

Mandy Greer pushes bad taste into the exalted realm of the fantastic. Like Tavoularis, Greer pushes what is ugly until it reverses itself into a new kind of beauty. Ana Lois-Borzi is a generation younger than Mike Kelley, who startled the art world in the 1980s with sculptures made of mounds of discarded stuffed animals. Lois-Borzi is working with fragments of discarded stuffed animals. The smaller she makes them, the more evocative they are.

Margaret Meehan contributes a wall of doilies, each brimming over with a sense of a constricted life. Sarah Hoffman photographs nature close up. The closer she gets, the more abstract her findings. Kim Bennett paints peaches in watercolor hanging on unlikely boughs, reasoning that “the dream world is easier to get around in.” Painter Rachael Weinstein has reduced trees to an almost invisible geometry, while painter Margie Livingston turns them into bits of barbed wire. The cream of Livingston’s field, in oil on canvas, serves as a consolation.

Text by Regina Hackett