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About the Exhibition
The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education’s
Environmental Art Program is pleased to announce the opening
of Ghosts and Shadows, presented in partnership with
The Center for Emerging Visual Artists.
Guest curator Warren Angle says of this exhibit, “Jennifer
Chapman, Keiko Miyamori, Kara Rennert, and Marisha Simons
were chosen to produce site specific installations because
of their poetic sense of place. Each artist has set up a dialogue
with the natural and human constructed landscape at the Schuylkill
Center for Environmental Education’s Second Site location.
They have mined specific references to place and sensations
of past and present using audio as well as visual components
in the construction of their works.” Ghosts and
Shadows will open at the Schuylkill Center’s Second
Site, a historic farmhouse and barn, at the corner of Port
Royal Avenue and Hagy’s Mill Road, Philadelphia.
About the Artists
Jennifer Chapman, a photographer living and
working in New Jersey, will return a semblance of life to
the abandoned Brolo Family farmhouse and barn in her piece,
Habitat. Chapman says, “This project is designed to
remind us of the human history at “Second Site,”
as well as to emphasize the persistence of human presence
in the space. By acknowledging the role that humans played
in constructing (and deconstructing) the site, the project
recognizes the farmhouse and barn as one of many habitats
in the area. While "looking in" to the space and
stepping backwards in time, we might consider the traces we
will leave in our own habitats.”
Keiko
Miyamori’s Human Bird House will entail
a large-scale tree rubbing collage on the front side of the
building wall of the old barn in combination with other small
bird houses in near vicinity of the barn. Miyamori, a Japanese
artist with a background in traditional Japanese painting,
says, “I am interested in creating imaginary spaces
where unity between nature and humanity can co-exist. I communicate
through sculpture, installation, drawing and painting.”
Approximately fifty bird houses will be suspended around the
barn, and several wooden birdhouses will be suspended in the
shed area next to the barn. “The exaggerated size of
‘Human Bird House’ in contrast to the relatively
small birdhouses situated next to it requires the viewer to
allow for humor as well as partake in the abstract moment,”
Miyamori says.
Kara Rennert, a visual artist living in
Philadelphia, will present the reanimation of the barn space
with her installation entitled Breath. “Through this
piece, I want the audience to be reminded of the emotional
and physical experience of being with an animal, especially
one that used to live there and used to be so integral to
our lives and survival,” she says. “Too often
in our modern world, and especially for city dwellers, people
lose their connection to the animal element of their natural
world. I would like to create a reminder that we used to have
a closer relationship with the animals with which we share
this planet.”
The final artist, Marisha
Simons, is a printmaker, installation artist, designer,
fine art edition printer, and teacher from northern California.
With her exhibit Ghost Forest she attempts to catalog
man’s impact upon the environment, specifically plant
and tree life, through his environmental degradation from
land clearing, demand for materials, contribution to global
warming, and his careless introduction of invasive exotic
species and diseases. “I have created a visual representation
of a selection of endangered and extinct plants and trees,
and I invite the viewer into a forest of ghost plants: translucent
silk panels that move when the viewer walks past, delicate
images floating above the ground, no longer planted in the
earth with a subtle epitaph sharing the plant’s history.
My hope is that my viewer will experience Ghost Forest
by walking amongst the trees, spending time with the
images in an imagined place where once they might have dwelled,
and engaging emotionally with the idea that each of us have
options about the impact that we make upon the environment
with the daily choices that we make,” she says.
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