“FIELD WORK”

VisArts at Rockville is pleased to present “FIELD WORK,” a group exhibition in the Gibbs Street Gallery and the Kaplan Gallery from March 8 through April 14. An Opening Reception will be held March 9 from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Nine artists investigate the relationships between community, resources, sustainability and art. Featuring the work of Dan Allende, Ian Cox, Selin Balci, Margaret Boozer, J.J. McCracken, Lynn Cazabon, Patterson Clark, Hugh Pocock, and Jackson Martin. The exhibition will include installations, prints, drawings, photographs, and videos. Free to view exhibition.

The nine artists in the VisArts exhibition “FIELD WORK” propose that sensitive observation and simple questions might be the first steps toward identifying what is valuable and how to sustain it. Working individually or collaboratively, the artists direct attention toward the obvious, but often taken-for-granted, natural world. They create participatory installations that investigate the relationships between community, resources, sustainability and art.

Literally and figuratively working in the field, these artists evoke poignant experiences with place, space and time. Hugh Pocock organizes a picnic lunch for the year 2032 as a way to imagine the future and make the connectivity of people the primary material of his work. His large scale banner announces, “Let’s meet again in 2032” … “unless either one of us are dead.” Dan Allende and Ian Cox send smoke signals from San Francisco to Rockville and provide sky-watching blankets printed with wind speed maps. Contemplating the closed environment of the gallery, Margaret Boozer and J.J. McCracken invite visitors to climb a slope of dying grass to read a rainfall calendar. In her videos and microbe-made drawings, Selin Balci presents evidence of the boundaries that microbial communities establish as they compete for food resources. Lynn Cazabon’s photography project, “Uncultivated,” focuses on the hardy weeds that pierce the urban concrete and signal the effect of global climate change on the urban landscape. Viewers can scan a bar code with their cell phones to identify the wild plants. Patterson Clark prospects for materials from invasive plants. His wood block prints are made entirely from the plant that they portray, essentially creating a “cradle to cradle” sustainable art-making system. Cazabon and Clark paired their efforts in a collaborative project that combines Cazabon’s photos printed on Clark’s “Alienweed” paper. In an odd, yet wondrous juxtaposition of the natural and the unnatural, Jackson Martin suspends a living forest overhead that hovers magically. 

The artists in “FIELD WORK” balance activism, elemental revelation, observation of systems, and sustainable practices. Their efforts are on the forefront of a vital and dynamic relationship between art and issues that affect community. They expose connections to a local and global ecology that includes
the natural, the social and the cultural.

 VisArts at Rockville is located three blocks from the Rockville Metro station at 155 Gibbs Street, Rockville, MD 20850. For information please call 301-315-8200 or visit www.visartscenter.org. Free.