Materia Medica
François Ghebaly
July 22 – September 4, 2020
Presenting artworks that are about nature and also derived from it, Materia Medica offers a combination of pseudo-scientific and surreal pieces to illustrate the perils of our exploitation of the environment. Curated by multidisciplinary artist Kelly Akashi, who poses the questions “What does nature own?” and “What will be inherited when humans are gone?” in her esoteric exhibition statement, the show focuses on materials and working methods that address our fragile relationship with the natural world.
Hugh Hayden contributes a white, flocked Adirondack chair with giant wooden thorns protruding from it that’s titled NIMBY, which is a name for a person who opposes unsightly urban projects in his neighborhood but not elsewhere. Janis Miltenberger presents a giant glass hand with a smaller silvered blown-glass hand inside that sits on a base defined by symbolic keys in her remarkable 2012 sculpture A Room For Our Wonder. And Ann Craven displays three dark, small-scale paintings from a 2006 series of canvases depicting the moon bewitchingly reflected in a body of water at night.