Hybrid Fields
September 16 - December 31, 2006
Hybrid Fields is a group exhibition of contemporary artists creating socially engaged art that explores philosophies for growing food, distributing food, and consuming food. Their art inhabits a hybrid space where art and life, art and agriculture, converge.Sono ma County is a unique agricultural community supporting small farmers who have raised livestock and a multitude of crops through the years, including apples, hops, prunes, and increasingly, grapes. As new technologies expand our capacity for producing more food, faster, through mechanization, hybridization, and genetic engineering, questions are being raised as to the environmental and social impact of such practices. The artists in Hybrid Fields incorporate the use of humor, metaphor, research,fictive narrative, and intervention to expand the context for contemplating how far food travels from the field to the supermarket,the waste of unharvested crops, the conversion of farmland for housing, and the lack of biodiversity that commercial farming brings.
The Artists and Works
Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell of Temescal Amity Works based in Oakland, California, presents Sonoma Preserve, a community-based project inviting Sonoma County residents to submit homemade canned goods for exhibit, to be judged for potential cash prize and to be accessioned into the Museum’s permanent collection. Amy Franceschini of Free Soil in San Francisco presents FRUIT, an installation of a re-created fruit stand, with plastic oranges and a stack of fruit wrappers containing information about Sonoma County agriculture for visitors to take away. Laura Parker presents a soil bar entitled Taste of Place,where you can smell the soil from a local farm and then taste the food that was grown in that soil, to experience the terroir. John Rogers of John Ko Systems Unlimited, in conjunction with Mariel Triggs of Old World Innovations, present The Sonoma County Mammalian Enology Experimental Pasturelands (MEEP), a humorous presentation of a fictive corporate proposal that combines the region’s needs to protect biodiversity in farming and to sustain economic growth. Rachel Major re-creates a meat market with shelves of fluffy toy-like cuts of raw meat, a playful conceptual representation of our disassociation from meat production. Christy Rupp, a New York artist presents food containers with corporate logos that question and comment on the genetically engineered food revolution. Alexis Rockman is a New York painter who envisions The Farm, a large-scale painting in which all the foods are technologically designed to maximize profits. Photographer Carol Selter presents an interconnected grid of tiles, entitled Fruition, which documents the food cycles of her local community garden.
And, outside the Museum walls, Susan Leibovitz Steinman installs a temporary garden near the entrance, entitled Sweet Survival,a pentagon-shaped urban apple orchard designed to propagate wild apples for future gardens. Free Fruit/Fruta Gratis is an action performed by Sonoma County artists Pam Bolton and Cindy Cleary, in which underutilized fruits from the region are placed in parks and neighborhoods in downtown Santa Rosa; a nearby chalk arrow invites pedestrians to take away these gifts for free. Arizona farmer and artist Matthew Moore presents a rooftop intervention entitled Green Roof on a small green building adjacent to the Museum; there he is growing a crop of hops as an aesthetic response addressing land use and development, asking the question “where will we grow food in the future?” Wowhaus artists from Sonoma County, Scott Constable and Ene Osteraas-Constable, present Tree Trust True, a social-interaction food-tasting event that will convene on an outdoor banquet table made from a fallen tree that seats up to forty people.
- Alexis Rockman
- Christy Rupp
- Amy Franceschini
- Pam Bolton and Cindy Cleary
- John Colle Rogers and Mariel Triggs
- Matthew Moore
- Shada/Jahn (Steve Shada and Marisa Jahn)
- Susan Leibovitz Steinman
- Temescal Amity Works
- Wowhaus
Reviews:
Dystopia Now - "Hybrid Fields' anything but bucolic", By Gretchen Giles
Also in the Contemporary Project Space
In conjunction with Hybrid Fields, artists Marisa Jahn and Steve Shada of Shada/Jahn present Swan Song, a lyrical contemporary art installation with a live fruit tree and constructed xylophone that renders the sound of falling fruit as a metaphor for the disquieting loss of un-harvested foods.
