Erika Lynne Hanson and Rachel Schmidhofer “ICICLES IN CAVES”

Field Projects

poster for Erika Lynne Hanson and Rachel Schmidhofer “ICICLES IN CAVES”

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Field Projects presents Show #32: ICICLES IN CAVES, a two person exhibition featuring the work of Erika Lynne Hanson and Rachel Schmidhofer. As a contemporary continuum to classic art historical genres such as Landscape Painting and Still Life Painting, Hanson and Schmidhofer contemplate what we have done and are doing to our environment, what the environment in turn does to us, how we naturalize what we do to each other, and how these “doings” are enacted in the media of representation during our lifetime.

Rachel Schmidhofer lives in New York City and makes still life oil paintings of aquariums, house plants, mineral collections, Plexiglas display cases and goldfish in bags. Through this domesticated collection we can trace the shadow of the wild from its hidden caves, ancient grottoes and mysterious fauna to our living room decor. What saves these works from simply documenting capitalist tokens of imperialism is Schmidhofer’s own sense of wonder and love for these objects and animals. At once vibrantly joyous and admittedly sad, the subjects’ aura not only becomes visible but begins to erase the physical bodies rendered, transporting us back to the original awe under which they were first discovered.

Erika Lynne Hanson lives in Phoenix, Arizona, but traveled to the arctic to make “Initial Encounters: like meets like, iceberg and glacier”. In the video, the artist symbolically reunites an iceberg (in the form of a flag) with the glacier from which it came; a poetic gesture reconnecting long divided companions. The flag, an emblem of country and conquest, is a material distortion from video footage Hanson captured and abstracted using a computer aided loom. Her attempt to plant the flag into the glacier fails as she is unable to pierce the ice, and must seek a less stable form of support. Alongside the video Hanson will be showing abstract sculptural forms reminiscent of shard minerals and icebergs.

For both artists, landscape is a dynamic subject through which they live, move and exist, but also a medium that is itself in motion from one place or time to another, circulating as a place of exchange, a site of visual appropriation, and a focus for the formation of identity.

Media

Schedule

from June 16, 2016 to July 30, 2016

Opening Reception on 2016-06-16 from 18:00 to 20:00

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