Works of
Kirk Crippens & Gretchen LeMaistre, Gary Green, Simon Gush, David Wilson

Curated by
Steve Bisson

Orari
Sunday 4:30pm–7:30pm

Lab27 is pleased to announce the reopening of its activities with the inauguration of the exhibition "Brief Stories on the Instrumental Animal", featuring selected works by Kirk Crippens & Gretchen LeMaistre, Gary Green, Simon Gush, and David Wilson.
The exhibition (October 9–25, 2020) opens a quarterly program dedicated to landscape and the image, through exhibitions, seminars, workshops, and other events.

Modernity presses the individual against themselves. This theme is central to Simon Gush’s work. In the film "Lazy Nigel, the South African" filmmaker offers glimpses of an alienated everyday life, anonymous architecture, and a landscape subordinated to productivity. The project "Live Burls" by Kirk Crippens and Gretchen LeMaistre documents a shocking cruelty inflicted upon the majestic sacred trees of the American West Coast. In 2013, Redwood National Park and other Northern California parks, home to some of the world’s greatest trees, suffered a severe attack by poachers that threatened the survival of the entire ecosystem. From coast to mountain, human intervention unfolds.

In "Shores Plains Mountains", David Wilson engages with the idea of constructed landscape within his own region, presenting views that document the fragmentation of space while also expressing a desire for abstraction beyond a defined destination. Gary Green, on the other hand, reflects on the landscape through water, as if seeking reconciliation with his surroundings, offering a quiet contemplation of a self that is inseparable from nature. Inspired by a stanza from Wallace Stevens’ poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", Green’s latest work ("The River is Moving / The Blackbird Must be Flying)" presents a series of serene observations along the banks of a waterway in his hometown of Waterville, Maine.

In the exhibition "Brief Stories on the Instrumental Animal", the curator Steve Bisson invites viewers to recognize in the landscape more than just a collage of fragments. Paraphrasing Juan Manuel Palerm Salazar, it proposes different interpretations of nature capable of generating new meanings and directions, including in a design or conceptual context. While acknowledging the irreversibility of human action, photography can still serve as a tool for raising awareness and fostering “other” transformations, suggesting perspectives, relationships, and possibilities.

exhibition views