Waste & The Natural World
After discovering Your Gallery, Charles Saatchi’s online platform for artists, we are interested to see how this rapidly growing resource is being tapped for exhibitions. Last week a group show called "Waste & The Natural World" opened in central London, featuring four international artists who all address environmental issues in their work and were hand-picked from the Your Gallery site. Curated by Rebecca Wilson from the Saatchi Gallery and Isabella Macpherson, director of arts programming at Adventure Ecology, the show is being held at The Gallery @ Adventure Ecology HQ, which is part of a larger organization founded to build public awareness about the environment. (Adventure Ecology emerged last year with a video game designed as a fun educational tool.)
The work exhibited in Waste & The Natural World includes painting, sculpture, photography and video. American artist Randy Wray (pictured right) "uses the debris leftover from his sculptures, paintings and discarded drawings to create new collages that explore contradictory impulses and ideas." Claire Morgan (pictured left), from Northern Ireland, says of her work, "I use materials that display signs of excess or decay, and find myself contemplating issues relating to the 'residues' that we as a society leave on the earth."
Further exhibitions at The Gallery will show work created by artists who are embarking on Adventure Ecology field missions to some of the world's most "environmentally trashed regions." The first mission, code name: Toxico, is in Ecuador where artist Gabriel Orozco, photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and film maker Dustin Lynn will record their findings.
Waste & The Natural World
19 January-1 March 2007
The Gallery @ Adventure Ecology
125 Charing Cross Road
London WC2H OEW
tel. +44 (0) 20 7758 4717
