At Westbeth Gallery: OMENS OF CLIMATE CHANGE February 1 – 16, 2014

Sculpture and painting confronting the reality of global warming.
OPENING Saturday February 1, 5pm – 8pm

Omens of Climate Change

Dave Channon, Arthur Dworin, Jonathan Bauch, and Meryl Meisler

EXHIBITION DATES: Feb 1 – 16, 2014
OPENING RECEPTION: Feb 1, 5-8 pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Sunday 12 – 6pm

A dynamic mix of sculpture and painting that uses the tools of art to confront the crisis of global warming. Mother Nature is thrashing wildly out of control. The icecaps are melting, glaciers receding, weather is destabilized – plant and animal species are going extinct. Drought, floods, erosion and acid rain falling from the sky threaten world food production. When will it become hard to breathe? In ten years, fifty or 100?

Four artists confront the rising tide of climate change. Meryl Meisler’s eerie premonitions of submerged NYC landmarks, Jonathan Bauch’s crashing waves intricately cut from steel, Dave Channon’s enormous insects and scrap metal creatures, Arthur Dworin’s revelations of a planet’s transformation into rusted desert. Beauty and fascination invest this exhibition with love of life and global concern. People now view apocalyptic weather as the true-life horror movie.

This certainly is not 1945 when the morning air in Brooklyn was sweet, and, I saw the milkman’s horse follow him down the street on my way to school. Hurricane Sandy was my wake up call. What is yours? –

Jonathan Bauch, Curator: Omens of Climate Change

Special Events

Sunday, February 2, 2pm-
Magic of Nature: a ritual in the Reclaiming Tradition with Bright Flame

Saturday, February 8, 2pm-
Climate Change in NY: Lessons for Public Health, Dr. Ernest Drucker with Karen Charman & ASCI

Sunday Febrary 16, at 4pm
Feb 16, 4pm- Live Song with Arleen Gottfried, Ayana Lowe and Eve Zanni

About The Artists and Presenters

Meryl Meisler is a photo-based mixed media artist. Meryl’s “Submersions” (1991-2002) juxtapose iconic NYC landmarks with the underwater world to explore issues of urbanization, information access, and environmental concerns. She received a NYFA Catalogue Grant for the series. Previous installations at Grand Central, throughout the NYC transit system, Brooklyn Museum and permanently at Columbia Univ., come to a community flooded 9 ft. deep by Sandy- Westbeth. “Signs”, a body of work in progress, uses watercolors, appropriated art teacher’s signs in NYC classrooms and satellite photos to question climate, education, and creative conflicts.

Arthur Dworin writes about his transition to a ground-breaking way of making art. —“In my current work the surface is literally rusted and many works impart the feeling of aerial landscapes. In the wake of mountain top removal for coal, contamination of soils and watersheds of surrounding areas takes place. This aspect of global warming raises the temperature of oceans and can also create a high acid content rain, which in turn can destroy the plants, leaving a landscape much like Mars. These works visually allude to this.” — Dworin’s numerous private collectors include MoMA’s former Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Dr. Peter Selz.

Dave Channon has deep roots in environmental activism. His recent series of paintings, “Intersections”, crashes man’s built environment into the natural world with a telescopic foreshortening of frame and space. The enormity of his global concern is balanced by a bent for steel sculpture that exploits a reservoir of whimsy. His first exhibition was in 1979 at Franklin Furnace in lower Manhattan. Channon’s paintings and oversize sculptures have been favorably mentioned in reviews in the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Village Voice, Art in America and New York magazine. His studio today is in Shandaken, just outside Woodstock, in the Catskill Mountains of NY State.

Jonathan Bauch adroitly manipulates welding technology; transforming the hard steel he starts with into the delicate organic forms of his sculpture. In taming the hard steel substance, the industrial quality of the medium is tempered by the indelible mark of the human hand in the work, visible in both monumental floor sculptures and smaller, intimate wall pieces. The resulting pieces seem to defy the material, exhibiting lacy qualities that engage the viewer in a visual dance. He has exhibited widely, in the NY metro-area, from an early show at the Bruce Museum in 1973 to his latest at Carter Burden Gallery, in 2013. He is the curator of Omens of Climate Change.

Karen Charman is an independent investigative environmental journalist with special interest in nuclear issues, energy, water, health, genetically engineered food, agriculture, and the food supply.

Dr. Ernest Drucker is Prof. Emeritus at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Adjunct Prof. of Epidemiology at Columbia Univ.; Sr. Research Associate and Scholar in Residence at John Jay College, teaching faculty at Bard Prison Initiative, and taught about climate change as a public health issue at CUNY Honors College. He’s currently working with the Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security at Northeastern Univ. on a project evaluating lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy. Drucker will discuss ways local communities can build resiliency in our response to natural disasters and build their capacity to help reduce the risks and harms of climate change to NYC’s most vulnerable populations facing climate change issues.

BrightFlame will lead a ritual to hear secrets the Earth whispers and what she asks of us. Feel free to bring items for the altars of air, fire, water or earth. Come with the intention to participate. Ritual will be followed by time for conversation, viewing the exhibition and meeting the artists. It’s time to awaken and reclaim the Earth!

ASCI The purpose of Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. is to raise public awareness about artists and scientists using science and technology to explore new forms of creative expression, and to increase communication and collaborations between these fields.

The Singers Ayana Lowe and Eve Zanni are renown vocalists who have performed individually and with jazz greats. Arlene Gottfried is a soulful singing photographer.

www.westbeth.org
CONTACT
Jonathan Bauch (212) 741-0739
OmensOfClimateChange@gmail.com