MinerAlert
MinerAlert
Thursday, August 10 - Friday, December 15, 2017
Rubin Gallery
Suzi Davidoff has been intricately engaged in the West Texas landscape she calls home, creating drawings paintings and prints that reflect both soil and sky and often incorporating found materials including cochineal, clay, natural charcoal and lichen. Mapping has long been central to her understanding of nature. In this exhibition featuring new work, Davidoff presents a series of drawings on found maps and globes and with an accompanying hand-drawn animation, a new medium for this established artist.
This group of works is a conversation about human-wrought changes in the ecosystem. It is an exploration of the contrast between the clarity and wonder of the natural world as the artist perceived it in elementary school science and geography classes and the present instability of specific natural forms, both seen and unseen, which may soon disappear. The project was inspired in part by the IUCN Red List of threatened species, an inventory of the conservation status of the world’s biological species.
Maps are part of our human system for observing, defining and ordering the natural world. Most of the maps and globes in this project are out-of-date, with countries that no longer exist and boundaries that have moved, referring to a changing world, both environmentally and politically.
The animation uses “Learning About Flowers”, a B&W 16 mm science film from the 1940s as its matrix. The animation, using transforming charcoal drawings, explores the process of growth as buds blossom into flowers.
