June 5 - 27, 2021
There will be no Opening Reception for this Exhibition
The work of these artists considers how we glean from the landscape—for food, inspiration, contemplation, and sources of beauty. Foraging is an act of engaging with wilderness to bring something home, an indistinct border crossed by the curious and observant.
Ben Kinsley
Biography
Ben Kinsley’s projects have ranged from choreographing a neighborhood intervention into Google Street View, directing surprise theatrical performances inside the homes of strangers, organizing a paranormal concert series, staging a royal protest, investigating feline utopia, collecting put-down jokes from around the world, and planting a buried treasure in the streets of Mexico City (yet to be found).
He has exhibited internationally at venues such as: Queens Museum, NYC; Cleveland Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Cleveland; Bureau for Open Culture; Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh; Flux Space, Philadelphia; Katonah Museum of Art, NY; Green on Red Gallery, Dublin; Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Florence; La Galería de Comercio, Mexico City; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe.
Ben has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts; Skaftfell Art Center, Iceland; Askeaton Contemporary Arts, Ireland; and Platform, Finland. His work has been featured on NPR, Associated Press, The Washington Post, Artforum.com, Wired.com, Rhizome.org, and Temporary Art Review, among others.
Kinsley is an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Visual Art in the Department of Visual & Performing Arts at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He is Co- Founder of “The Yard” and President of the Pikes Peak Mycological Society.
Statement
”As an amateur mycologist I spend a lot time foraging for mushrooms. This requires deep observation and attentiveness to the landscape, and it has changed the way I interact with nature. Studying mushrooms is a great way to shift one’s focus, to slow down, pay attention, and be present. Many people aren’t aware that John Cage was also a renowned mycologist. I see a direct relationship between Cage’s ideas of “silence” and his interest in mushrooms. Both offer a formal opportunity to observe the often ignored but deeply meaningful happenings of the world around us.
Through the process of photogrammetry, I “scanned” polypore (conk) fungi found in the forests of Colorado, and created 3D models of their fruit bodies. These models are customized to fit speakers, and 3D printed. This series consists of two mushroom- inspired sound sculptures:
All That The Rain Promises plays a binaural field recording of an early morning rain in the central Adirondacks. The title takes its name from a mushroom identification guide (All That the Rain Promises and More by David Aurora), and references the feelings of excitement, anticipation and hope that a rainfall produces in mushroom hunters.
Leave It or Double It plays a recording of my voice reading the Latin names of 24 mushroom species over the sounds of sculptor Christopher Duffy learning to play his custom, hand blown glass Armonica. This piece is an homage to John Cage who once won $5 million Lire on the Italian game show Lascia o raddoppia by reciting, in alphabetical order, from memory, this list of white-spored agarics described in Studies of American Fungi by George Francis Atkinson (published in 1900).”
Betsy Powel
Website | CV
Statement
Foraging for wild plants, bugs and small sea creatures is what I do, continuing a tradition my father, a Maine guide, started 60 years ago. Our gallery pieces all start with picking some grasses, blossoms, leaves or something that catches my eye as an interesting shape and texture and taking it into the studio and pressing soft clay down on top of it. It is a joint venture between the plants and me to make the design and Heather and her fine eye to handle the tricky painting. The clay we use has a very fine grain so the details it catches and the color it reveals is quite enchanting.
Elody Gyekis
Biography
Elody Gyekis is a painter, animator, and sculptor who uses visual storytelling to reinvent traditional gender roles. Elody earned her MFA in Painting at the New York Academy of Art and her BFA in Painting and Ceramics from Penn State University. Her paintings have been exhibited in many solo and group shows in Pennsylvania and New York, and also across the USA, Central America and Europe. She completed artist residencies in Sibiu, Romania in 2014 and Giverny, France in 2018. Elody has taught painting workshops in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Honduras, and Costa Rica. In addition to her fine art, she has been a community arts organizer and muralist for many murals and other public art projects in Pennsylvania and beyond. Elody currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Statement
”Alongside my primarily figurative artistic practice, I have also always painted the plants and landscapes of Appalachia. These forests and flowers are in my blood. When I was a kid, my mother was part of the Pennsylvania Native Plant Society. She would take me along on their walks, and I became the unofficial photographer of the group. I was enchanted with the new digital cameras and more than willing to get down on my knees in the mud to capture the plump genitalia-like pink lady slipper flower or the mysterious digestive juices within the hairy walls of a carnivorous pitcher plant. Spotting delicate native wildflowers on walks through the woods and knowing their names is a thrill that has never left me. Even more exciting was when I began to learn that you could eat many of them: violets and dandelions could be plucked and snacked on as I strolled; the backyard became a delightful spicy salad of herbs and greens. In the kitchen, my family developed new seasonal traditions: black locust blossoms fried in a light batter and served with powdered sugar, bracken fern fiddleheads blanched and cooked with ginger and spicy Sichuan peppercorns, wild oyster mushrooms tender and savory with garlic and soy sauce. I was delighted to discover that my forest was full of delicious food that only cost me the pleasant and rejuvenating time spent in it. Then, I began to learn that there was even more magic than a beautiful sight and a delicious meal in these plants: they were medicine too. In my mid-twenties I contracted Lyme’s disease and had a long and difficult battle to regain my health. Jennifer Tucker, depicted here as the subject of my painting The Herbalist, and other natural healers helped me to recover my strength, alongside doctors of modern medicine. I painted this portrait of Jennifer as homage to that experience, trying to capture her wisdom, generosity, and healing spirit. She has introduced me to this deeper magic of plants, and I will be forever grateful to her for it. The wildflowers that I chose to paint alongside this portrait are all favorite native wildflowers of mine that all also have traditional medicinal uses in various Native cultures.”
Erik Hoffner
Biography
Erik Hoffner was raised on the North Fork of Long Island, where a large portion of his childhood was spent foraging and fishing the sound, bays, and tidal creeks with his family.
Direct connection to the source of so many foods – from bluefish to blue crabs, oysters and clams – provided a rich, early education in both ecology and cuisine. He then earned an environmental science degree in upstate New York before moving to the West Coast and then the Southwest, where new sorts of foraging opportunities like mushroom hunting became his focus.
Such people & nature-type topics came to dominate his photography and journalism career. Now living on seven acres of hardwoods with his wife in Western Massachusetts, he exhibits his work regularly and is as an editor & podcast producer for the award-winning, global nonprofit news provider Mongabay.com, which keeps 10 million monthly readers informed on the latest developments in environmental news and science.
See additional photo and editorial projects at erikhoffner.com and connect on Instagram and Twitter via @erikhoffner.
Statement
”For the past decade, I’ve carried my cameras along while following friends and neighbors into the woods, onto bays and frozen lakes, and across fields thick with eye-high grasses as they pursue wild food.
Putting such ingredients on the dinner table has become popular again, with wild food features regularly splashed across the pages of major newspapers and glossy magazines.
My series Hunter/Gatherer documents just some of the myriad ways that people pursue such wild foods, from ducks and deer to wild herbs, fruits, roots, fish, and mushrooms.
What these foragers will tell you is that beyond the nutrition or healing properties of the herbs, or the complex taste of wild vegetables or game, it’s also a direct connection to the outdoors that they seek.”
Jennifer Anne Tucker
Biography
Born in 1945 Jennifer grew up in the western prairie landscapes of North Dakota from a young age developed a fearless connection to nature. She chose to study multiple art mediums at Minneapolis School of Art and Design and through a serendipitous encounter with a loaned twin reflex camera she found a way to relate to and see into the spirit of nature. Majored in film and photography at the University of Minnesota and supported herself with a side-career as a private detective. In 1969 married Gerald Lang and relocated to the forested ridge-and-valley region of central Pennsylvania completing a BFA and in 1975 an MFA degree in photography and film from Pennsylvania State University.
The 1970’s and 80’s active in the Feminist Movement and she began studies with herbal mentors, Evelyn Snook and Bill Russell and pursued self-education in Shamanic and healing arts. Awakened to environmental concerns, her exhibition photography explored ideas of the female metaphor in landscape and self-portraits in “collaboration with nature”. Jennifer and her husband, Gerald Lang, purchased an 1820’s farm, and renovated the house and barn, raised horses, restored strict organic practices to the land, supported habitat restoration and created The Studio at Hill Crystal Farm. The farm is catalyst, muse, where nature is the teacher and where the intersections of Jennifer’s diverse practices and visionary imagination merge.
Publications:
The Botanical Series Photographs by Gerald Lang and Jennifer Anne Tucker the University of Wyoming Art Museum. Exhibition dates June 8 – August 17, 2013 We were invited and featured artists for guest teaching, presentations and lectures. (4 books included for sale.)
Evelyn’s Ways Cleansing & Nourishing with Plants by Jennifer Anne Tucker (self-published)
A book honoring my herbal mentor, her stories, recipes, illustrated with our botanical images.
Isotope A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing “The Art of an Herbalist Jennifer Anne Tucker” by Nancy Marie Brown
Statement
”In my art and herbal practice, it’s always about getting others to pay closer attention to literally what’s growing around us and what is right underfoot. I intentionally print larger-than-life-size images of misaligned lawn “weeds” seen, unseen and “famous” endangered wild plants to inspire a closer look.
THE BOTANICAL SERIES is my re-visioning of botanical art, integrating the new digital imaging technology using a digital flat-bed scanner to capture the live gestures, patterns, personalities and portraits of fresh plants. No camera is used in this process. The plant itself is laid directly on the glass bed of the scanner, digitally recorded without manipulation. We believe the healing message inherent in the plant portrayed is transferred to the hyper-reality of the larger-than-life-sized digital print, creating a presence so real the viewer often wants to touch the surface of the paper print expecting to touch the plant itself. The Ink-jet printing process uses archival pigmented inks on archival papers, retaining the plant-based origins into the art itself.
Medium: Digital Scanner photography. All final images in the exhibit, framed and unframed are custom printed by the artists on archival papers using pigmented ink-jet printers for museum quality permanence.”
JP Powel
Biography
JP Powel, B 04.12.1942, New Bedford. Graduated from Harvard in English Lit. 1964, Sophomore at RISD 1965, Peace Corps, Ecuador 1966 -1968 where he met Betsy. They married, built their home and started Salt Marsh Pottery on the edge of Allens Pond in Dartmouth, MA. Now both Salt Marsh Pottery and JP’s Yellow Boat Studio operate in their renovated schoolhouse in Russells Mills village, Dartmouth, MA. They are open to the public and delight in welcoming visitors. JP has shown locally but mostly sales have been to visitors to his studio.
Statement
”My life and Art in Foraging
I learned to swim, age four, foraging for Quahogs. We ate them raw, juice and guts dribbling down our chins.
My mother, Dody Powel, taught me to clean and fry sunfish. We made stews from snapping turtles. She taught me to know the common field mushrooms and poach them in evaporated milk with eggs and sliced tomatoes. We had wild blueberries and cream for breakfast, stewed wild rabbit for supper (chew carefully and spit out the shot pellets.), black mussels sautéed in butter and white wine. Excellent salads can be made from wild greens if you know which. Just ask Eva Sommaripa, famous of Eva’s Garden. Her wild rose petal sherbet is fit for the gods!
Betsy, my wife, daughter of a Maine guide, was raised on venison (which she enjoyed skinning), perch, squirrel, racoon, opossum, and even porcupine. As for porcupine, “Tastes like turpentine” she says. When I lived in my shack, roasting rabbit on a stick over a campfire was excellent and pheasant stuffed with wild cranberries even better. Small marsh oysters are the sweetest and most delicate. And, yes, I have had roadkill for dinner. Am I one to scorn a fresh black duck some considerate motorist provided?
And there is dump picking, so I include the Ugly Lamp from the Lovell, Maine Dump.
In these paintings are plants and animals that can be foraged. The beasts themselves are foraging. For help identifying, I will provide a list and commentary each painting.”
Riitta Ikonen
Biography
Originally from Finland, Ikonen (b.1981) completed her MA at the Royal College of Art, London. She was nominated for Ars Fennica, Finland’s biggest art price and lectures and performs internationally. Her collaborative project Eyes as Big as Plates with Karoline Hjorth, featuring older people camouflaged in nature was nominated as the best first photobook at the Paris Photo / Aperture Foundation’s Photobook Awards, second book on the series comes out this fall. Her recent works have been exhibited at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics, Tate Britain, Bemis Center of Contemporary Art, Winzavod Art Center in Moscow, Photographer’s Gallery, Pioneer Works, Gulbenkian Foundation headquarters, and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others. She is a keen forager and the founder of Sea Changes, a global winter swimming workshop series. She works from Rockaway Beach in New York and Finland.
Statement
Riitta Ikonen's work threads together memory, myth, imagination and an anthropomorphic view of the natural world. Originally from the deep eastern Finnish forests, she mediates interaction between people and their environment that materializes as performance, video, wearable sculptures and photographic portraiture. Reveries stand out as a survival strategy while investigating the various ways humanity occupies and interprets this planet and certain elements, usually small and insignificant, pique Ikonen’s interest. Pre-COVID, Ikonen used to travel most of the year lecturing, exhibiting and performing around the world with various collaborators. She is currently enthusiastic about Eyes as Big as Plates Vol II, mycology, horseshoe crabs, moss, cyanobacteria and TNR.
Shelley Lawrence Kirkwood
Biography
Shelley Lawrence Kirkwood earned her BA with a concentration in photography from Hampshire College and her MFA from the University of Arizona. She has served in the curatorial departments of the Center for Creative Photography and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Her art practice serves to isolate and embellish ostensibly ephemeral, and insignificant aspects of the landscape as a means of exploring themes of home, memory, and perceptions of time. She lives and works in Amherst, Mass.
Statement
The work in this series begins with creating mushroom spore prints. Spores are tiny, reproductive cells that allow fungus to replicate and grow; the prints are generally used to help identify the genus of a specimen. On paper, they manifest as dusty replicas of the original forms. Because the initial images I gather are impermanent, I cut arrange them into collages, before photographing them. Born of actual living organisms, the collages point to larger patterns and systems in the natural world, at once suggesting the furious division of cells, and the eternal expanse of deep space. I am equally compelled by the biology, and by the lyrical mysteries of nature intermingling in the ghostly topography of these impressions.
