Green
Opening: July 4th, 2011 at 6 pm
Date: July 4th – August 1st 2011
Artists: Kristýna and Marek Milde (CZ/USA), Norman Locks (USA), Paul Hempstead (VB/USA), Miloš Šejn (CZ)
Child guest: Willem McCafferty (8 years)
In-Tree-Net
The project In-Tree-Net engages the dilemma between systems of Nature and artificial architectural structures. It investigates the influence of architecture on the understanding of Nature. It follows the phenomena of a new special kind of species: “Homo Interius” a contemporary human, who spends most of its life inside of a white cube separated from the influence of the surrounding environment. Despite of the unlimited access to a flood of information, his relationship to his immediate surroundings and the environmental context is blurred and disconnected. Ultimately this alienated perspective towards Nature has consequences for today’s ecology.
In-Tree-Net is based on an interior setting, which as such seems not to be influenced by Nature. The site-specific installation is made out of trees and branches mounted on the walls resembling pipes and wires of engineering systems that bring vital functions into the buildings. Trees and their complex interconnection present in the ecosystem of the woods are here reduced to a rigid model of a machine representing the mechanistic approach towards Nature. Pipes which architecture usually attempts to cover in order to create an intact environment are here revealed to bring the outside inside pointing to the environmental dependency of the seemingly independent interior environment.
In-Tree-Net critically approaches a culturally contingent understanding of the nature of Nature, which produces perspective, that nature as such has borders, a beginning and its end, similar to architecture and urbanism. Nature here is an element that penetrates not only the walls, but also crosses artificial borders, that divide landscape without a context, cutting through the mountains and rivers. In the In-Tree-Net the organic systems represent an idea of bringing closer the nature and the way of its estranged perception, implying a reconnection of the fragmented environment to a whole.
Paul Hempstead
Paul's installations work with environmental themes, echoing his dedication to stop pollution on the planet.
Norman Locks
Professor at Art Department, University of California, Santa Cruz will present his photographs of virgin forests in California.
Miloš Šejn
Born 1947 in Jablonec upon Nisa, Czech Republic. He graduated from The Charles University in Prague at 1975 (in fine art – Doc. Zdeněk Sýkora, art history and aesthetis – prof. Petr Wittlich, Doc. Miloš Jůzl).
Being The Javoří Brook, The Giant Mountains, 27. 7. 2000
He works in the fields of visual art, performance and study of visual perception, and conducts workshops, such as Bohemiae Rosa. His artistic concept was formed in his youth when he undertook many trips into the wilderness as a reflection of an inner need to get closer to nature's secret and observe the miracles that happen in it. From the beginning of the 1960s he took pictures, drew, collected and described his observations of nature during these wanderings. Currently he teaches mixed media and the relationship of nature and art as intrinsic needs of the mind at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1990-2011), and focuses on immediate creative possibilities, based upon relations between historical humanized landscapes and intact nature.
Photogallery from the opening Photos of the exhibition
