Declines

Shifting Baselines Residency and Exhibition Project

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Gallery Talk & Exhibition Opening
Monday, January 7, 2013 – 6pm @ Santa Fe Art Institute

Shifting Baselines Exhibition
January 8 – 25 – Monday – Friday, 9am – 5pm @ Santa Fe Art Institute

Shifting Baselines, an exhibition curated by ecoartspace founder Patricia Watts, opening on the 7th of January, 2013,  will show existing and new work from installation artist Hugh Pocock and painter Cynthia Hooper, a Northern California painter and video artist who teaches at College of the Redwoods in Eureka.

Shifting baseline is a scientific term used to describe the way changes in the environment can be measured against previous reference points (baselines) that represent significant changes from the “original state.” For example, places that swarmed with a particular species hundreds of years ago may have experienced long-term decline, but it is the level of recent decades that are considered the appropriate reference point for current populations. In this way large declines in ecosystems or species over long periods of time were, and are, masked. There is a loss of perception of change that occurs when each generation redefines what is “natural.” This term has become widely used to describe the shift over time in the expectation of what a healthy ecosystem baseline looks like.

The exhibition will also be the inaugural event of the Santa Fe Art Institute’s 2013-14 season of programming – Contested Space, focusing on arts role in communicating and exploring new territory in an already mapped out world.

To learn more about the Shifting Baselines residency and exhibition, please go to the Santa Fe Art Institute blog.

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Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

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Declining newspapers: arts moving into empty spaces

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Artists love disused space. Artists And Makers have been tweeting me about the Empty Shops Conference they’re running on October 19. Meanwhile here’s another example of a street artists moving into a disused property. The collapse of the newspaper market in the US has been even more precipitous than it has been here in the UK. Print ad sales fell by a horrendous 30% in the first quarter of 2009; titles have been disappearing at an alarming speed.  The newspaper is a strange but crucial part of the social glue in the US, a country where there is no such thing as a “national” newspaper outside of USA Today. Americans are losing a major part of the way in which they tell their stories.

Out of decline comes opportunity. Here’s an example of one street artist Bumblebee, who has been opportunistically taking over empty newsboxes on the streets of Los Angeles, to create a series of narrative tableaux, linking the declines of newspapers to that of another endangered species.

The art, it has to be said, is pretty grim. Nice idea, though…

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology