Drawing Conclusions: A LandLab Residency Exhibition

Exhibition runs April 13 – May 22.

Opening Reception Thursday, April 30, 5-7pm with Artist Talks at 6:00pm The Center for Emerging Visual Artists Gallery, 237 South 18th Street, The Barclay, 3rd Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19103 215-546-7775 | cfeva.org

Philadelphia, PA – The Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA) is pleased to present Drawing Conclusions an exhibition by CFEVA LandLab Artists in Residence. The exhibition will be on view in CFEVA’s gallery April 13 to May 22. There will be Artist Talks and a Reception on Thursday, April 30 from 5-7pm. There will be a closing reception featuring botanical cocktails by WE THE WEEDS on May 22 from 5-7pm. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11am – 5pm and by appointment.

Drawing Conclusions features the work of LandLab Artist in Residents Jake Beckman, Leslie Birch, Hagan/Mills/Mills and WE THE WEEDS. This exhibition focuses on the results of each artist’s installation at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education and how the outcomes of their residency inform ecological restoration issues. Each artist will present the results of their installations, including documentation of the evolution of their installation over time, data collected and how their artistic process is influenced by the residency.

LandLab is a unique artist residency program that operates on multiple platforms: artistic creation, ecological restoration and education. A joint project of The Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA) and the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education (SCEE) LandLab offers resources and space on the Schuylkill Center’s 340-acre wooded property for visual artists to engage audiences in the processes of ecological stewardship through scientific investigation and artistic creation.

Jake Beckman is a sculptor and educator living and working in Philadelphia. Jake teaches Art and Design at the Community College of Philadelphia and graduated with an M.F.A. in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a B.A. in Art from Swarthmore College. In addition to making work that explores systems and materials that sustain our way of life through a wide range of media, Jake has had a lifelong interest in biology, chemistry and many of the other physical sciences. His work explores themes of transformation, process and legibility as he grapples with the relationship between labor, value and substance. Jake is interested in the origins of the manufactured environment, as well as a concept of the displaced and abstracted landscape; a landscape in which earth and rock are mined, crushed, sintered, shipped and recompiled into an ordered system of buildings, cities, and bridges. He uses the visual language of industry, as well as the raw ingredients of the built environment— coal, stone, ore, etc.—to explore the memory of a time when Americans were more intimately connected to the processes that constructed and sustained their material surroundings.

Leslie Birch fancies herself a tech geisha in Philadelphia. Her fascination with the combination of interactive art and robots led her swiftly to electronics. An original member of The Hacktory in Philadelphia, Leslie is an authority on LED “Throwies” and Arduino microcontrollers. Her artistic practice has led her to working with Leah Buechly, inventor of the first stitchable microcontroller and winning NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge for the Orbit Skirt – a skirt that can track the International Space Station, as well as Senti-8, a wrist band that allows astronauts to experience the scents they miss. More recently, another invention, the FLORAbrella, has garnered attention around the world as a color sensing umbrella that can match clothing and do rainbow patterns. Currently Leslie creates projects and tutorials for Adafruit, a DIY electronics company in New York promoting education. She can also be found blogging about wearables for both Adafruit and Element 14. Her hangout is Hive76, a hackerspace promoting open source hardware in the Spring Garden area. When not hacking hardware, Leslie shares her tech love through speaking engagements, teaching at the library’s MakerJawn program and planning events like LadyHacks. Her free time is spent hiking, camping, letterboxing and birding. Yes, she loves Star Wars and you can follow her @zengirl2.

Hagan/Mills/Mills is an arts collaborative consisting of Philadelphia based artists Maggie Mills, Ben Mills and Marguerita Hagan. Their LandLab project, Native Pollinator Garden focuses on Colony collapse Disorder (CCD). Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)

“is a syndrome defined as a dead colony with no adult bees or dead bee bodies, but with a live queen and usually honey and immature bees still present.” (USDA)

Native Pollinator Garden provides a variety of native blooms that follow three full seasons of succession. This provides forage for several generations of pollinators each year. The beds are constructed of chemical-free Douglas fir, are filled with a blend of organic, local soil and leaf compost, and are planted with native, organically grown plants from a local nursery. Native Pollinator Garden addresses the threats posed by monoculture, non-native species’ parasites and disease, GMO’s, and pesticides. It serves as an example of the importance of local action on an individual level.

WE THE WEEDS is a botanical arts collaboration headed by artist Kaitlin Pomerantz and botanist Zya S. Levy that seeks to highlight and investigate the presence of the natural world within the manmade landscape. Past projects include ethno botanical tours, participatory art and science experiments, public art installations, educational outreach, and culinary and sensory plant experiences. WE THE WEEDS has worked in participation with Practice Gallery, the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, the Asian Arts Initiative, and the Penn Center for Urban Research. The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education inspires meaningful connections between people and nature. We use our forests and fields as a living laboratory to foster appreciation, deepen understanding, and encourage stewardship of the environment.

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists is dedicated to coordinating a strong regional support system for visual artists, to advance the careers of professional artists in the region, to promote relationships between artists and the communities in which they live, and to increase access to and promote interest and understanding of visual art among citizens of the community.

Support for LandLab is provided by the Knight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation and the William Penn Foundation. This project was supported in part by the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts program of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Support also provided by PECO. This program is administered regionally by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.

Thank you to Marnie Lersch, Program Associate for the content of this DoNArTNeWs post.  marnie@cfeva.org (215 )546-7775 ext 13

Philadelphia Open Studio Tours EAST: Oct 3 & 4 l WEST Oct. 17 & 18 – noon – 6pm

Center for Emerging Visual Artists The Barclay, 237 S. 18 St., Suite 3A Philadelphia PA 19103

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