January 8 – February 2, 2019 at the Kathryn Schultz Gallery
Reception | Friday, January 11, 6-8pm
Curatorial Walk Through | Saturday, February 2, noon-2pm Click here to RSVP
Curated by Patricia Miranda, Artist, curator, and educator; founder of MAPSpace & The Crit Lab, Port Chester, NY
“One of the penalties of an ecological education,” he wrote, “is to live alone in a world of wounds.” Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949
Exhibiting Artists | Christine Aaron, Beth Dary, Katherine Jackson, Michelle Lougee, Heidi Neilson, Melissa Potter and Maggie Puckett, Julie Poitras Santos, Deanna Witman
Exhibition Statement | What is wrought when one is cleaved apart from nature? Modern culture’s insistence that we are outside of nature has led to an estrangement from our wildness. The consequence of seeing ourselves as separate from nature, and therefore of each other, has wrought havoc on the body of the earth and on the bodies of her people. Disenfranchised grief, or Solastalgia, a palpable form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, reflects our increasing sense of loss.
This Lamentation is felt in rising extinctions and raging storms, and in the witness of the blood-soaked earth. Artists respond to this rupture through an intimate exchange with the rhizomatic world. The objects in this exhibition mourn, lament, rage, rejoice, hope, and react to our changing ecosystem. A sense of sorrow, and momento mori, pairs with hopeful activism and a sense of solophilia, or love and responsibility for the material world. These artists reflect on the inextricable network of life, and share an anguish alongside material outcries for change.
“Solastalgia,” a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’”
Glenn Albrecht
About the Curator | Patricia Miranda is an artist, curator, and educator, using interdisciplinary projects to build connections between art, science, history and culture. She is founder of MAPSpace, a gallery and project space in Port Chester, NY. Miranda has been Visiting Artist at Vermont Studio Center, the Heckscher Museum, and University of Utah; Visiting Lecturer at Purchase College SUNY, Kutztown University, WCC Peekskill Center for Digital Arts; and been awarded residencies at I-Park, Weir Farm, Julio Valdez Printmaking Studio, and Vermont Studio Center. She has received grants from ArtsWestchester/New York State Council on the Arts, and was part of a year-long NEA grant working with homeless youth. Miranda is the first Practitioner-in-Residence at Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts of the University of New Haven, and led the first study abroad program at the university’s campus in Prato, Italy in spring 2017. She is core faculty at New Hampshire Institute of Art’s low-residency MFA program, and teaches curatorial studies in the grad program at Western Colorado University. She served as director and curator of the Gallery at Concordia College-NY from 2008-12. She has exhibited at Wave Hill, Bronx, NY; the Cape Museum of Fine Art, Cape Cod MA; the Belvedere Museum, Vienna Austria; Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY; and Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY.
Click here to read the press release
PURCHASE THE CATALOG
<Image in header courtesy of Deanna Witman>