Contingent Continents: The World Over

Hundreds of ants industriously eat away at a map of the world in Rivane Neuenschwander’s video work, Contingent (2008) (below). Made of honey, the map slowly disintegrates into nothingness as the formidable continents shrink into smaller islands- mere specks of their former grandeur. This insect frenzy is a metaphor for the poignant and fraught relationship between consumption and the environment; it queries the consumptive habits of humankind and the detrimental consequences such consumption wreaks upon the natural world. While nourishment for ants is a necessity, the reasons for our environmental extortion might not always be deemed essential.

Part of The World Over, a group exhibition curated by Scott McLeod currently on view at Prefix Institute of Contemporary art in Toronto, Neuenscheander’s video thematically links the first work seen upon entering the exhibit, Cuban artist Glenda León’s photograph Between Air and Dreams (2003), with Donna Conlon’s video and photographs of ants, installed in the main space of the gallery. León’s work comprises an image of clouds, assembled into a map of the world while Conlon’s series Coexistence (2003/2008) depicts leaf-cutter ants carrying near-microscopic pieces of various national flags. León’s cloud continents, those fickle and ever changing bits of the atmosphere, speak to Earth’s future as contingent rather than immutable while the harsh borders of nationality are imagined as collapsed, again by the industry of ants, in Conlon’s film and photographs. In all cases, nature reigns supreme while the constructed borders humankind ironically fall prey to the whims of the natural.

These and other works on view in The World Over at Prefix Institute of Contemporary art in Toronto from May 2 through June 22, 2013.

- Natasha Chaykowski

Amy Brener

These latest sculptures by New York-based artist Amy Brener are something magical. Made of a combination of materials like resin, pigment, and glass (Brener describes these as “totemic structures…of an imagined future,”) these objects combine natural and artificial aesthetics to create something familiar yet strangely distant from a what we know. As the artist describes:

“Some sculptures may be markers for an unknown border, while others hint at vehicular function. Some surfaces are ordered into compositions that allude to touch-screen platforms, energy cells and the digital logic of a different reality. Other surfaces are left to chance: to crystallize, crack under pressure and weather with time. Common sculpture materials such as resin and concrete shed their associations and morph into geological forms. I enforce approximations of natural processes onto my sculptures. Notions of sedimentation, erosion and fossilization come into play.”

See more of Brener’s work at her website here. And read more at her MoMA Studio Visit Page here.

- Erin Saunders

Paper Reefs

Some artists use materials related to the subjects they paint when creating art pieces, but artist Amy Eisenfeld Genser doesn’t pick up found object at her local beach when she creates her reef pieces. She takes pieces of coloured paper, rolls them up, and positions them in a way that the final outcome looks like a natural formation of barnacles or sea sponge.

Her pieces are visually mesmerizing, with a hint of something magical! It is like entering into a new world when you look at her work. The mosaic of shapes and colours created by the rolled paper, juxtaposed onto an already painted canvas, stimulates the senses. The artist herself claims her work is both irregular and ordered, using texture to mimic natural motifs.

It is amazing how paper, a material traditionally made from trees, can be manipulated to recreate the basic structures of a reef, which to some, may be considered a tree of the sea. Nature once again creates a connection within itself through art practices.

-Anna Paluch

Kyle Bean for Men’s Health

Check out the most recent work by UK artist and designer Kyle Bean commissioned for Men’s Health Magazine. In his characteristically simple style, Bean poetically illustrates the mind-matter relationship by combining a common image and unconventional materials. At once visually pleasing and thematically meaningful, Bean’s work is able to incite big questions with only a little reworking of everyday images.

Follow Bean’s work at his website here.

- Erin Saunders

Connections: The Tree of Life and Death

Connections are everywhere, be they symbolic or literal. Every connection has its purpose, from the tiny fibers of an adult human fibroblast cell, which connects (or adheres) to extracellular matrixes, to trees, with their deep roots, connecting themselves to the ground. See, even these two seemingly different objects, with their own unique connections, can also find a way to be connected to each other. A photograph of a network of adult human fibroblast cells looks oddly similar to that of a pink tree (taken by Heather Champ) found in San Francisco, but, where the cells actually help produce more cells, more life, the pink tree is in fact, dead. It can no longer grow or blossom, like the cells in their own way. That does not mean this tree cannot still be admired aesthetically in some way.

An unknown artist, upon hearing of the death of the tree, decided to give it new life by transforming it into a small but significant urban art piece. Though it was taken down not long after, it shows that even when dead, natural objects such as trees can still be used to make beautiful art.

So artists go one step further, and create art long after a tree has been cut down and transformed into a new object; a piece of paper. Artist Emma Taylor creates a series of work called “From Within A Book” where she takes pages of a book and sculpts various scenes, such as a stork carrying a baby or a person reading a book. One work that particularly stands out is that of a large tree, coming out from between two pages. It reminded me of the pink tree, and even of the fibroblast cells.  Like the pink tree, the tree used to make the pages is long dead, but the artist has taken the pages, connecting them together like cells, to create a new tree.

Though not truly living, it is an echo of its former self, and yet, still as beautiful. The tree seems to be one of few natural objects that can be beautiful and inspiring in both life and death.

-Anna Paluch