Artist Ilana Halperin at Artists Space

Elizabeth Campbell Kelly | Apr 5, 09:39 AM | digg del.icio.us

This Thursday, Artists Space opens their spring (yay!) exhibition with 3 artists - 2 of whom work with natural processes.

 Artist Ilana Halperin, whose work exploring the personal narratives of Icelandic volcanoes we put up on topophilia in 2006, works with geologic time at an intimate scale.

Saul Becker will also present work in a show called "Nature Preserves"

Opening at Artists Space, Thursday 9th 7-9pm 38 Greene Street 3rd Floor. Show runs April 10-June 6

lana Halperin: Physical Geology (slow time)

Ilana Halperin’s work explores an impulse to make physical contact with geological time. While conducting research in the geology department at the Manchester Museum, Halperin discovered a fine collection of lava medallions from Mount Vesuvius—magma pressed between forged steel plates to form an imprint (imagine a waffle iron that makes use of lava instead of pancake batter.) During her research, she also came across a small stone relief sculpture that appeared to be carved out of pure white alabaster. The object was in fact a limestone cast created via the same process that forms stalactites in a cave—the residue of a high velocity calcifying process. These findings have led Halperin to contemplate the notion of physical geological time—fast moving lava flows vs. slow time inside a cave. Halperin’s overarching project is to make a geological time diptych involving new lava medallions and cave casts, allowing slow and fast time to hover alongside each other.

The Artists Space exhibition will focus on the cave casting component of Halperin’s research. As these objects take one and a half years to become pure geology, the gallery installation will serve as a prologue presenting petrified narratives alongside a cave cast model—a kind of geological alert.

Ilana Halperin (b. 1973, New York, NY) lives and works between Glasgow and New York. She received an MFA from The Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, Scotland and a BA with Honours from Brown University, Providence, RI. Previous solo exhibitions include Physical Geology (part one) at the Manchester Museum and Nomadic Landmass at doggerfisher in Edinburgh. Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Polar Dispatches at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Estratos, PAC Murcia, Spain and Experimental Geography, iCI (Independent Curators International,) currently touring.

Saul Becker: Nature Preserves

Saul Becker has spent the last two years collecting weeds near his home in industrial Brooklyn. From unlikely sites – gas stations, polluted Newtown Creek, corner vacant lots – Becker finds the most hearty of natural specimens in disregarded and unnatural sites. By developing a system of electroplating each plant sample, he archives what is overlooked, undocumented, and generally stepped on or built over.

At Artists Space, Becker will exhibit for the first time his electroplated plants, creating idealized fields of flora from un-idealized sources. In collaboration with sound artist and composer Stephen Vitiello, Becker’s plant specimens incorporate sound, echoing their Brooklyn homes. These objects, long used as a reference for Becker’s landscape paintings of industrial sites, are preserved and unlikely objects of beauty. Fierce underdogs of our city’s industrial past and present, the work reminds us that nature is always just below (or creeping above) the surface.

Saul Becker (b. 1975, Tacoma, WA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA and a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) Halifax, NS. He is represented by Sunday L.E.S. in NYC, and his work has been featured recently in solo exhibitions at Volta NY and Sunday L.E.S. along with exhibitions at Platform Gallery, Seattle, WA, Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA, The Lab Gallery, NY and the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, among others. He was the recipient of the prestigious Virginia Museum of Fine Art Fellowship as well as a residency at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE.