Curators / Tracey Fugami and Randy Wood

Seeing Green

Brandon Ballengee
Debra Baxter
Buddy Bunting
Diane Carr
Tim Duch
Larry Giacoletti
Laura Stein
Randy Wood
Jim Woodring
Jenny Zwick

January 6 – 30, 2005
Reception / Saturday, January 8, 7–10pm

The artists of Seeing Green are fascinated with nature, from its smallest creatures to its most vast and barren spaces. Seeing Green brings together urban artists from New York and Seattle who use imagery, both real and imagined, of the natural world to explore concepts of abstraction, realism, and politics. Some works ponder psychological implications and others provoke emotive responses. To illustrate the diversity in which this topic has been explored, artists working in painting, sculpture, video and digital have been chosen by Randy Wood (SOIL) and Tracey Fugami (independent curator living in Oshkosh WI). As a co-curated project, both Wood and Fugami bring together a bi-costal viewpoint on the environment and nature.

Seattle painter Buddy Bunting has recorded the prisons of Western Washington's high desert in both drawing and painting. His work portrays the flat openness of the west and man's often antiseptic presence there. Tim Duch, also has a similar take on the landscape. His documentary style depicts Brooklyn bridges in decaying colors amidst waterways that seem both modern and ancient.

The watercolors and drawings of Randy Wood and Jim Woodring bring to life surreal worlds populated by supernatural creatures. These images are lyrically enticing as well as eerie and delightful. In addition, Diane Carr's sculptures are playful and witty. Carr uses commercial materials such as plastic and foam to create fantastical wonderlands. Carr's intimate constructions give the viewer an opportunity to ponder what they may have overlooked in the natural world.

Debra Baxter uses organic forms as an aesthetic expression. Baxter's soft, organic sculptures are seductive and often appear in unexpected places on gallery walls and ceilings.

Laura Stein's video and performance, Not in a Shy Way, takes place in the Redwood forests of California. Her body is used to explore the dialogue between human movement and the stillness of nature. An equally meditative work by Larry Giacoletti, Waterdrops places nature into a technological realm. With the advent of sound recordings of nature for personal listening pleasure, Waterdrops reflects upon a similar question of portable nature. While Stein investigates physically melding with nature, Gicoletti attempts to capture and store it. The Palm drawing could be viewed and enjoyed from a busy subway car to the office cubicle.

The works of Brandon Ballengee and Jennifer Zwick bring to mind the world of 19th century science or the mutants of 1950's science fiction. Zwick creates new species of insects by mixing and matching insect parts, then displaying them neatly at the ends of pins. Ballengee's Malamp series investigates mutated frog specimens and their environment. Ballengee often teams with scientists to work on his projects which often require field and lab work.