University Of California Berkeley

H20 – Preview: Matthew Hebert

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This post comes to you from Green Public Art

On May 6, 2011, H20: The Art of Conservation, at the Water Conservation Garden, San Diego, CA, will open to the public. Green Public Art reviewed over 1100 artists portfolios before inviting 14 San Diego artists to participate in the exhibition which offers San Diego homeowners an artistic alternative to incorporate water conservation into their own garden spaces. Green Public Art awarded each artist a mini-grant to develop their site-specific sculptures. In the weeks leading up to the exhibition opening the artist’s concepts will be revealed on this site. Questions? Contact Rebecca Ansert, Curator, Green Public Art at rebecca@greenpublicart.com.

CONCEPT: Special Deliveries is a series composed of three sculptures with solar powered mechanical peephole dioramas within. From the exterior each piece presents itself as a rural curbside mailbox mounted to a piece of plastic lumber and planted in a terracotta pot along with some cacti. The interiors feature unique dioramas depicting historic moments in various water reclamation projects of the western states. The viewer looks through a peephole and lowers the flag on the mailbox to activate the scene within. The pieces represent the construction of the Hoover Dam, the accidental creation of the Salton Sea, and the attack on the Los Angeles Aqueduct in Owens Valley.

ABOUT: Matthew Hebert creates work that deals with technology and its effect on the domestic environment and our sense of space. His work takes recognizable furniture forms and layers new forms of use and meaning into them. Ultimately, the work generates new forms of interaction between the object, environment, and the user. Matthew received his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley; and his Master of fine Arts at California College of the Arts. He has taught at several schools including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, CalArts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently Assistant Professor of Furniture at San Diego State University. 

Rebecca Ansert, founder of Green Public Art, is an art consultant who specializes in artist solicitation, artist selection, and public art project management for both private and public agencies. She is a graduate of the master’s degree program in Public Art Studies at the University of Southern California and has a unique interest in how art can demonstrate green processes or utilize green design theories and techniques in LEED certified buildings.

Green Public Art is a Los Angeles-based consultancy that was founded in 2009 in an effort to advance the conversation of public art’s role in green building. The consultancy specializes in public art project development and management, artist solicitation and selection, creative community involvement and knowledge of LEED building requirements. Green Public Art also works with emerging and mid-career studio artists to demystify the public art process. The consultancy acts as a resource for artists to receive one-on-one consultation before, during, and after applying for a public art project.

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1906 SF earthquake “a hoax”

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Touching on denialism in that earlier post, there’s a piece on The Guardian website about the deniers’ conference held this week in New York, Global warming – Was it ever a crisis?

This in the week that the Copenhagen Climate Change summit reports on the sea’s dangerously rising acidity, the attempt at calculating the volumes of CO2 that will be released as ice melts and tundra thaws in the event of a 2 degree temperature rise, the raised predictions for sea-level rises and the prediction by some scientists that climate change makes the attempts to save the existing rainforests a labour of Sisyphus.

At times like this, thank God for The Onion:

SAN FRANCISCO—In an event that sparked outrage across the historical community, deniers of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake convened last weekend to share their controversial theories about what actually occurred on that tragic day more than a century ago.

The 1906 Earthquake Deniers, a group reviled by Californians and scholars alike, held three days of lectures and roundtable discussions over what they call a “century-long hoax” of exaggerated seismic activity in the Bay area, and part of a conspiracy to bring the World’s Fair to San Francisco in 1915. Historians protested the conference, saying the organization’s statements denying any major seismic activity in 1906 are reprehensible and out of line with all available geologic data from the time.

“On Apr. 18, 1906, an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale killed 3,000 San Franciscans and devastated a growing metropolis,” Professor Richard Kasper of the University of California, Berkeley, told reporters Tuesday. “It was a massive, massive earthquake. To say otherwise is to callously ignore not only the suffering of the disaster’s victims, but also a mountain of photographs, video footage, and eyewitness reports.”

Added Kasper: “And I find it personally offensive to suggest that a single malfunctioning trolley car could have wiped out 490 city blocks.”

Hat tip to Denialism blog.

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