NYAB Event - “Un/Natural Occurrences” Exhibition

“Un/Natural Occurrences” Exhibition

Central Booking

This event has ended.

CENTRAL BOOKING celebrates its long awaited re-opening in its new home on the Lower Eastside at 21 Ludlow Street. The event-filled reception on September 12 features thREAD, a performance of wearable book art that also launches OffLINE, our new interdisciplinary multi-use space. On view, as always, are the more than 160 international artists of CENTRAL BOOKINGʼs Artistʼs Book Gallery.

The newly named Haber Space, our gallery for art and science exhibitions, will open with Un/Natural Occurrences, curated by CENTRAL BOOKINGʼs founder, Maddy Rosenberg, and featuring the work of 25 artists and collaborators. These are artists who are searching for more
than the obvious in either bringing to light past and current indiscretions, warning against a catastrophic future if unheeded, working with the scientific community on possible solutions and sometimes just telling it like it is. We view this exhibition as a bookend to Natural Histories, which launched CENTRAL BOOKINGʼs initial space in 2009.

Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris initially paired up as The Canary Project to document climate change, now bring more multi-faceted complexity to the plate. The multi-color etched artistʼs books of Cynthia Back do more than record the landscape, but exposes one that is
overrun through over development. Travis Childers builds pieces of the landscape of the future or is it a future that has already come? Eve Mosher invites us all to participate in our own regreening of the world. Artists and scientists both, at the Institute of Sustainable Futures in
Sydney, Australia, Aleta Lederwasch paints a gateway to environmental practices from here to there as Jade Herriman and Annie Bolithoʼs community actions are geared to an appreciation of our waterways wherever they may be.

Tar paper and garbage bags never looked so elegant than in Suzan Shutanʼs growing abstract elegies on a very real problem. Julie A. McConnell puts a colorful twist on the debris of a consumerist society and its effect upon the sea, just as Molly Heron takes repurposed plastics heading for the landfills and finds an aesthetic solution. Anne Gilman digs beneath the surface, exposing natural erosion compounded by human consumption. The march to destruction of Art Hazelwoodʼs global warming deniers elicits a simultaneous smile and sigh. Tammy Wofsey etches her way through the road to extinction and a fanciful way back from it while Judy Hoffman produces possible organic creatures of a fall-out. Evelyn Eller books a trip through the melting glaciers of Alaska, alas Michelle Wilson papercuts the disappearance of one that has already fallen victim in Bolivia. Susan Goethel Campbell is under the weather and over and around it, too. Florence Neal takes rubbing drawings of dying trees in a natural ecosystem as Peter Fend charts unnatural changes to Jamaica Bay and the natural way towards solutions. Eve Andrée Laramée delves deeply into the problem of nuclear waste while Elena Costelian presents us with a man-made wasteland.

Tatana Kellner illustrates the toxic chemical effects of hydro fracking as they mix with the water table. Sabra Booth may present us with the essence and insecurities of oil rigs, but Ilse Schreiber-Noll has her take on disasters whether they be of natureʼs doing or our own. Appreciation of the environment is one thing, actively creating a better one through thoughtful growth is the work of our institutions, with a steady prodding by us pointing them in the necessary directions.

Media

• Drawing
• Photography
• Installation

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