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ART AND DESIGN FORUM - ARFD400

October 26, 2017, 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Location Calcia Hall - 135
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In Burchfield's Wake:  Artists Respond to the Environment

In collaboration with the Montclair Art Museum

As the earth heats up and more and more people inhabit it, consuming precious resources and exploiting the landscape, we humans find ourselves confronting a need for significant change in the way we respond to our world.  Environmental artists Adriane Colburn, Ellen Driscoll and Marina Zurkow have made this question central to their art making practices.  On this panel they will discuss their work and address issues of resource consumption and its material lineage, as well as romanticized notions of wilderness, the alteration of nature by industry and climate change and the relationships between scientific exploration and exploitation. Moderated by MSU professor Julie Heffernan.

Adriane Colburn is an artist based in San Francisco, CA and New Jersey.  Her recent work, large scale installations that investigate the complex relationships between human infrastructure, earth systems, technology and the natural world, have been exhibited throughout the US and internationally at venues such as Smack Mellon and Parsons/New School in New York, The Luggage Store Gallery and The Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, Artsterium in the Republic of Georgia and at the Royal Academy of Art in London. A penchant for research and direct experience has led her to participate in scientific expeditions in the Arctic, the Amazon and at sea. She has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Macdowell Colony, the Kala Institute and The Blue Mountain Center. Adriane is currently on the faculty at Bard College.

Ellen Driscoll’s work encompasses sculpture, drawing, and public art installation. Recent large scale installations include “CartOURgraphy” for Middle College High School and the International High School in Queens, "Night to Day, Here and Away" for the Sarasota National Cemetery, “Distant Mirrors” for the Providence River, “FastForwardFossil #2” at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, and “Revenant” and “Phantom Limb” for Nippon Ginko, Hiroshima, Japan. Earlier works include “The Loophole of Retreat” at the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris, “As Above, So Below” for Grand Central Terminal (a suite of 20 mosaic and glass images for the tunnels at 45th, 47th, and 48th Streets), “Catching the Drift”, a restroom for the Smith College Museum of Art, and “Wingspun” for the International Arrivals corridor at Raleigh Durham airport. Ms. Driscoll has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute at Harvard University, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the LEF Foundation, the Rhode Island Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, a 2014 Fine Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2015 Siena Arts Institute Fellowship.  Her work is included in major public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of Art. She is Program Director of Studio Arts and Visiting Professor of Sculpture at Bard College. 

Julie Heffernan’s work explores mind’s eye imagery to create complex environments. She is represented by P.P.O.W. in NY and Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. Heffernan is a member of the National Academy. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the world, including Hauser and Wirth in London and New York.  Heffernan has received numerous grants including an NEA, NYFA and Fullbright Fellowship and is in the collection of major museums including the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of FineArts.  Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University.

Marina Zurkow is a media artist focused on near-impossible nature and culture intersections, researching “wicked problems” like invasive species, superfund sites, and petroleum interdependence.  She has used life science, bio materials, animation, dinners and software technologies to foster intimate connections between people and non-human agents. Her work spans gallery installations and unconventional public participatory projects. Currently, she is working on connecting toxic urban waterways to oceans, and researching the tensions between maritime ecology and the ocean’s primary human use as a capitalist Pangea.