Finissage & Performance blending gestures of food service, gardening, and personal upkeep
Installation with plants, sculptures made from bio-based materials and found objects, containers and structures commonly found in gardens
Exhibition Opening
Thursday, April 25, 6-8 pm
Open Studio / Plant Exchange
Saturday, April 27 12-4 pm
Finissage & Performance
Saturday, May 4, 11am-1pm
A performance by Erin Woodbrey and Sarah Williams (Aesthetically Complex Pies) will take place at 11:30am:
" Past and Future Poundcakes: a 10 minute performative pound cake preparation, blending gestures of food service, gardening, and personal upkeep."
Erin Woodbrey’s Gardeners for a Geologic Afterlife is a site-specific installation realized for the Goethe-Institut’s 2024 170 Residency Program. Developed in this winter before residency, the installation mirrors the choreography of a gardener as they prepare for the growing season, weaving together sculpture and gardening practices to form a spatial narrative of a garden in spring.
Inspired by ancient methods and mythologies of gardening and agriculture and a contemporary movement to rethink cycles of waste and consumption, Gardeners for a Geologic Afterlife looks both backward and forward, seeking to find new ways of imagining our material lives. The project’s individual components comprise found objects, living plants and natural elements such as soil, clay, wood, leaves, and stone, as well as novel materials, including bioplastic and substrates composed of paper pulp, fiber grown in the garden, seashells, seaweed, eggs, coffee grounds, and other waste matter. Elements of experimentation, quasi-scientific investigation, and chance appear across the installation. Toggling between states of rumination and speculation, Woodbrey’s installation reads as the relic of a past garden situated in an imagined future. Bearing witness to time, place and ecosystems, the work presents as a site for garden of the future, where tools of the past return from obsolescence to propose new material possibilities.
Erin Woodbrey is a New England-based artist whose interdisciplinary work utilizes sculpture, printmaking, photography, and time-based media. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Here After with Megan Biddle, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, PA; of the Sun, Yes We Cannibal, Baton Rouge, LA; Wilder Alison + Erin Woodbrey, Expo Chicago, Gaa Gallery, Chicago, IL; Beacon, 201 Telephone Box Gallery, St. Andrews, Scotland, UK; The Fragment Series, Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Quill Isn’t Staying Now, with Dani Leventhal ReStack, Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany. Her work has been included group exhibitions at Cry Baby, Berlin, Germany; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; SÍM Gallery, Reykjavík, Iceland; Greylight Projects, Hoensbroek, Netherlands; Code Art Fair, Copenhagen, Denmark; Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; International Print Center, New York, NY, and Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia, among others. Woodbrey received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. In 2007 she completed a BFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, where she also is the recipient of a 2017-18 Traveling Fellowship.
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