Exhibition Dates: June 8 - June 30, 2019 Reception: Saturday, June 8th, 7-10pm
The paired solo shows by Areca Roe and Rebecca Krinke offer two ways of seeing, studying, and knowing. Areca explores the precarious state of the earth’s health in her photographs of the changing climate in Alaska, and Rebecca’s work springs from investigating the inner landscape of learning and making from dreams, the subconscious, and intuition.
Areca Roe presents Drunken Forest, a new body of photographs and video. Areca photographed around Fairbanks, Alaska, where discontinuous permafrost has long been part of the landscape, but the rising temperatures are shifting and changing the land. Sinkholes are appearing in the landscape, and the shifting ground is altering areas of forests to become tilted or "drunken," and some houses that rely on permafrost as a stabilizing factor are slumping.
Areca spoke with several scientists researching the permafrost in order to locate sites to photograph, to capture the visual manifestations of the changing landscape. The resulting series is titled Drunken Forest, the evocative term used even in scientific literature for the areas of forest destabilized by permafrost thaw. These visual changes serve as powerful metaphors/warnings for the far-reaching and destabilizing consequences of permafrost thaw, and climate change in general.
Rebecca Krinke presents a new installation: Down Below, a psychological space of wonder and terror that continues her series of bed sculptures and the rooms that begin to take shape around them. In Down Below, a tangled mass of black feathered canopy charges the space below with the feeling of a storm on the way. As visitors gaze down into the mirrored pool, they will see things only visible in reflection. Stacks of her black bound notebooks again appear in this installation, evoking memories, secrets, writing, and deciphering. This work goes deeper into the dream that started her work as an artist, and incorporates insights from a recent dream. For the first time, Rebecca is introducing sound into one of her installations - in collaboration with sound artist David Hedding.
Down Below asserts that our lives are powered by mystery and informed by our subconscious, our intuition, and our dreams. It asks questions into what we can see, what we can say, what we can discover, what we hold on to, the costs of holding on, and the power of transformation. Rebecca owes a thank you to artist artist Leonora Carrington, who in 1944, wrote a moving memoir titled Down Below. Rebecca Krinke
Areca Roe is a fiscal year 2019 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
