Christine Baeumler "Lost Menagerie"
M55 Art
This event has ended.
Christine Baeumler and Jil Evans have been engaging Charles Darwin’s life and work artistically over the past three years in a focused investigation of the role of the imagination in light of evolutionary biology. The artists are producing two distinct, yet closely related bodies of work based not only on Darwin’s understanding of nature, but also by investigating the physical locations that influenced Darwin’s thinking. Metamorphosis, transformation and sentience are common themes that link the two bodies of work.
Baeumler’s Lost Menagerie features the video installation, “Darwin’s Table.” Inspired by Darwin’s experiments, a long wooden table supports five bell jars containing specimens of “experience.” Unique Galapagos species are depicted under the glass jars. In the center of the table, a fish eye appears to repeatedly morph into a human eye, referring to our evolutionary past as well as the spectrum of consciousness from animal to human. Christine Baeumler also collaborated with composer Reid J. Kruger and sound producer Dean Lozow to transform recordings she made on location into compositions reflecting both the natural and human environment, which are part of the gallery installation.
The exhibition also includes a series of paintings, which describe the surreal results of the evolutionary process in deep-sea animals. Emphasis on the image of the eye suggests notions of non-human sentience, as if the animals depicted are aware of their predicament.
Christine Baeumler grew up in Buffalo, New York. She received her BA from Yale University, and her M.F.A. from Indiana University in Bloomington. Christine is an assistant professor in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. She has participated in numerous exhibitions regionally and nationally and has recently exhibited work in Germany and Korea. She has been also involved locally with ecological remediation efforts in Swede Hollow Park and the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary in St. Paul.
Funding for Lost Menagerie is provided in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and private funders. Additional support had been provided by the University of Minnesota Grant-in -Aid of Research, Artistry and Scholarship and the Department of Art.
Media
Schedule
from January 08, 2009 to January 25, 2009
Opening Reception on 2009-01-08 from 18:00 to 21:00