The Gallery @ Adventure Ecology, in partnership with Your Gallery, opens in January with a group show of international artists entitled 'Waste & The Natural World'. This exhibition showcases the work of four exceptional artists, selected from the Your Gallery website, who share Adventure Ecology's concerns about the environment.
In his 'Offal' series New York-based Randy Wray uses the debris leftover from his sculptures, paintings and discarded drawings to create new collages that explore contradictory impulses and ideas. His flamboyant compositions of crystals, sticks and bits of paper pulp have an almost Victorian appeal but conjure an underlying sense of doom, suggesting, as Wray puts it, 'that as civilization covers every inch of the globe, the natural landscape is fast becoming a place that will be more remembered than real'.
Claire Morgan, currently living in Newcastle, UK, will be making a site-specific work for the exhibition, continuing her exploration of objects that simultaneously illicit a sense of beauty and repulsion; chaos and safety; life and death. 'I use materials that display signs of excess or decay, and find myself contemplating issues relating to the "residues" that we as a society leave on the earth.' Given the impermanent nature of Morgan's materials, she will be in The Gallery for one week before the opening working on her piece for the exhibition.
In Rising Water Levels Samantha Cross, who graduated in 2006 with a first class BA (Hons) in Art Practice from the University of Glamorgan, South Wales, addresses the fragility of life, alluding to global pollution and climate change. Pieces of broken umbrellas are submerged in a series of 50 plastic bags filled with water, the number of bags corresponding to the last ten years of our planet, the warmest on record, and five melting polar ice caps. Cross's subtle yet powerful work suggests not only that our attempts at fending off the elements will prove futile, but that we as a species will through our own making be overpowered by changes in the natural world.
Influenced by Romantic expressions of religious mysticism and the sublime, Relja Penezic's video works examine the complex relationship between our destruction and perception of the natural world. Sublime spectacles of majestic ocean-liners gliding through the mist belie the fact industrial pollutants have contaminated the surrounding air and water. With toxic waste continuing to be shipped to the most beautiful places on earth, our perception of the sites historically assumed to be wonders of the natural world will have to be revised. Belgrade-born Penezic now lives in San Francisco.
The exhibition is co-curated by Rebecca Wilson from the Saatchi Gallery and Isabella Macpherson, director of arts programming at Adventure Ecology.
Your Gallery, founded in April 2006 to provide a forum for artists to show their work to a global audience via the internet, has established itself as a rich source of exceptional new artistic talent.
Waste & The Natural World
19 January - 1 March 2007
The Gallery @ Adventure Ecology
125 Charing Cross Road
London WC2H OEW
gallery@adventureecology.com
T: +44 (0)20 7758 4717
