EARTH STATEMENTS
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Ben Pranger’s piece, Elergy, located in the main gallery space, has an ethereal presence. The artist has tied fresh leaves together with nylon string and suspended numerous strips of them from the ceiling. Interspersed throughout are handbags fabricated of chicken wire, also hanging from the ceiling, that contain slabs of ice with pennies embedded in them. As the ice melts, the pennies fall off and the water drips into pans. Pranger gets across the point that the money spent on progress comes at nature’s expense, but the piece is thin and utilitarian: the chicken wire in particular handicaps the look of the piece. Yet the intermittent sounds produced by the water dripping and pennies falling do capture your attention. Though this work is underdeveloped in some ways, it has wonderful potential.
Just to the left of Pranger’s work is Nicole Beck’s installation, Succession. Beck has set up what appears to be an elaborate nature experiment. A number of garden vegetable roots hung upside down on the wall are in themselves striking: seldom in our mass-produced food market do we have the chance to view plants pulled from the ground with their root systems intact. In front of them is a long, flat rectangular trough filled with water; at one end is a box filled with plants, and at the other a box filled with smooth pebbles and covered with Plexiglas. On top of the Plexiglas are jars containing seed samples and carefully labeled with dates. On the opposite wall is a wooden shelf containing test tubes or vials partially filled with grain or seed. Beck asserts the need to embrace, even revere the growing process, and the elaborate experimental overtones in Succession hint at reclamation, seed preservation, or perhaps simply the act of gardening itself. Yet a good deal needs to be explained. Though artists’ statements often reduce the work to a didactic textbook level, here’s one case where a statement might have helped. This piece is open-ended to a fault.
Though it’s problematic in certain respects, “Earth Statements” has much to offer the viewer, on both a sensual and an intellectual level–and it’s an important step for artists whose ideas are still evolving.
