Ellie Irons

Back in Brooklyn & River to Creek

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:01:24 +0200

I’m in the midst of getting my head (& body, I suppose) back into the bizarre ecological niche that is North Brooklyn. I’m doing research for a project I’d like to carry out involving bioremediation and water from English Kills (the closest thing to a creek or river to be found in this neighborhood). After spending time at Signal Fire with some awesome activism-oriented artists like Katherine Ball and organizers Amy & Ryan, I’ve been considering/re-considering the role of activism in my own work. I just came across a great blog post by current iLAB residents River to Creek that covers a lot of what I’ve thinking about lately:

Art, Science, Activism, and Bicycles

Their upcoming River to Creek Bike Tour sounds intriguing too. After spending time in Portland, I’m feeling more than a little bike-culture withdrawal.

Signal Fire!

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:29:00 +0200

I just completed a week in the Mt. Hood National Forest with Signal Fire. This was a really unique & inspiring residency. More coming soon!

Installing Chrysalis on Bedford Ave.

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:14:22 +0200

We had an interesting installation session for Chrysalis on Friday. Here are some shots from a bustling evening on Bedford Avenue. Documentation from the finished installation (video and stills) to follow!

Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:48:49 +0200

I’ve got plenty of summer reading to do. Still I keep looking around for more. Just downloaded this journal, via a tip from ecoartspace. I haven’t had time to read any of it yet, but looking over the article titles, it sounds intriguing. Check it out here.

Trade School on Kickstarter

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:41:20 +0200

Trade School has almost reached their $9000 fundraising goal on kickstarter. Only 8 days to go, and they need $1500 more! Check out their kickstarter page. Plus, there’s a neat photo from Andrea and my drawing class on their most recent update page :)

From kickstarter.com:

“A pan of Ellie Iron’s class, “Drawing for Pleasure and Relaxation”. Ellie led students through several drawing exercises — in the dark, with sticks, with wire and with their own shadows. You can see more photos from Ellie’s class at our Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ourgoods/sets/72157623391669809/”

Art in the Open, Philadelphia

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 05:07:05 +0200

It’s coming up! June 9-12 I’ll be working outside, on the banks of the Schuylkill River, as part of Philadelphia’s first Art in the Open festival. I just came across a nice blog post about the festival here. If you have any Philadelphia recommendations, ecological or otherwise, send them my way!

Great Fallings

Sun, 16 May 2010 21:32:32 +0200

After a week of hard work out in Paterson, Great Fallings opened successfully last night! I think my melting/dripping Passaic River water piece (“Proglacial Hydrating Structure”) ended up being a successful experiment. More documentation coming soon, but for now, here are a few photographs Dan snapped during the evening. More (and larger) on flickr.

Oil & Marshes...

Sun, 02 May 2010 23:33:00 +0200

This is a good (in a depressing way) article from the times on the wetland ecosystems being threatened by the oil spill in the gulf. For some reason I’ve got a particularly soft spot for grassy, marshy landscapes. I wish there was something I could do to help. Do they need someone to clean pelican feathers, perhaps? Sigh.

The article describes how normal, healthy marsh grass would recover fairly quickly from oil inundation, but the gulf coast marshes are already in a fragile state, and this could be “the last straw”:

Normally, these grasses have great resiliency. They are similar to a lawn, said Irving A. Mendelssohn, a professor at Louisiana State University who has done studies oil’s effect on the local ecology. If they are damaged only above the ground, they will grow back swiftly. But if the roots die, the plant dies and the ground underneath it sinks into the sea within a year.

A coating with a sheen of oil would do little harm, Dr. Mendelssohn said. But, he said, “if you have oil coming in consistently, the cumulative effect could be severe. If the plants keep getting reoiled, you get a smothering effect. The vegetation could no longer do photosynthesis, and then it can’t sustain itself.”

It’s strange to go about my life with this disaster progressing in the back of my mind. Regardless, it’s been generating some terrifyingly gorgeous photographs. From the Big Picture:

Future Archaeology

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:10:00 +0200

I’m working on a new collaborative project. It opens next Friday, May 7, 7-10. Much circuit building and branch sculpting to be done before that! More details here.

Noise pollution & Songbirds

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:24:00 +0100

I’ve been struggling with the effects of a ambient city noise invading my urban home over the past few months, but I’ve never thought that closely about what influence this might have on my avian neighbors (there are barely any in our current part of Bushwick!). Apparently, the constant noise from human industry and transportation affects birds as well, causing decreased ability to communicate through song. Given the fact that many songbirds depend on this kind of communication to establish territories and find a mate, increased noise results in less successful pairings, and thus decreased population growth. Here are two articles that summarize some of the recent research on this issue. Both these articles were posted a few years ago, so I’m digging around to see if there is more research underway:

Live Science: Noise Pollution Threatens Birds
Greenchange: Noise Pollution Makes City Songbirds Change Their Tune

Also doing much singing, but apparently not bothered by all our noise…this guy (European Starling) is by far the most common songbird in our neighborhood:

Sunday Morning Read...

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:55:14 +0100

I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Jaron Lanier’s new book “You are Not a Gadget” over Dan’s shoulder the past few days. Ironic, because this is just what Lanier, according to an article in this morning’s Times, describes as the trending habit in reading: “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.” Regardless of my other offenses in this area, I did manage to read the Times article, “Texts without Context”, all the way through. It touches on a variety of issues we hear a lot about these days, but ties them together in a way that seems useful to me. I was intrigued by the author’s approach to meta-ness, particularly the mention of “events as fodder for digital chatter.” Probably I should sit down and read Lanier’s book in its entirety at some point. In the meantime, I think maybe our students will have to read “Texts without Context” over their upcoming spring break :)

Everglades Deal Slowed :(

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:40:00 +0100

Over a year ago, I wrote an excited post about a pending deal between US Sugar and the Florida Water Board- a deal that would have placed a massive amount of agricultural land into a preserve, aimed at restoring the flow of water through the Everglades. This plan had been heralded best and perhaps only solution for saving this dying ecosystem- the lack of fresh, clean water flowing through this sprawling wetland is slowly strangling it.

Last week the NY Times reported on the situation again, in the front page article “Deal to Save Everglades May Help Sugar Firm”. Since last year, the deal has been reduced to 72,800 acres from close to 200,000 when the plan was announced, with the state still unsure about whether it can afford the $536 million dollar price tag. Complicating matters is the fact that the price offered to the state is based on appraisals done years before the economic crash. Both US Sugar and the Florida state government were in very different economic positions at that point. According to the Times, US Sugar is now in dire straits, and the purchase from the government could provide a lifeline to help the company remain solvent. Land values have plummeted, but the deal is still based on the earlier appraisal, a price which the state is no longer in the position to pay. According to a second article in the Times on Friday, Florida Water Board officials have extended the deadline for the deal by another 6 months. They voted unanimously to “keep the deal alive” but even so, it seems to me that it may be slowly dying, along with the ecosystem it seeks to save.

There have also been critical responses to the Times’ coverage of the story, on both sides of the issue. So complicated! I am most interested in the extreme and wondrous complexity of ecosystems, but bureaucratic complexity is intertwined in these issues as well, in a way that can’t be ignored.

Drawing at Trade School

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:35:31 +0100

Dan took some lovely pics while we were holding our workshop last night. It was a good experience, and gave me some food for thought in terms of future workshops and exercises.

This looks fascinating:

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:16:40 +0100

(via Dan) Jason Kottke points to a recent study on morphological changes in North American birds. Apparently wing shapes are beginning to change in response to changing habitats, specifically deforestation. I’ve yet to read the original post, which links to the original article, but I’m looking forward (with some trepidation) to following that trail. I would imagine that over the span of my life time we’ll see more and more evidence of this kind of direct connection between human activity and ecological change.

Drawing for Pleasure and Relaxation

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:12:05 +0100

I’m teaching a drawing workshop with Andrea Jenkins next Tuesday night at Trade School. The class has filled up (yay!) but we’re considering looking for other locations to teach it, probably around Bushwick. The workshop centers around the idea that reconnecting the hand, eye, and mind through drawing can start with exercises that relieve tension and build comfort levels. Learning a new skill inevitably involves hard work and degrees of frustration, but the initial steps of learning to draw (getting comfortable with the movement of your hand on paper) and can be soothing and enjoyable. I’ll post some of the exercises and approaches here next week, once we’ve completed the first workshop.

Image: Andrea Jenkins, Chair Tents Plants, watercolor, graphite and carbon transfer on paper 2008

Out of school...

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:17:11 +0100

Sort of! I’ve finished my masters, but continue to go to school, because of all this fun alternative/free school stuff that is going on in NYC of late. I particularly enjoyed some classes at the temporary Trade School (Grand Opening) over the past week. There are still a few weeks remaining to get yourself some education for barter. Dan is teaching on February 12!

(Image ripped from the OurGoods website)

Watershed Closes Tomorrow

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:33:00 +0100

My MFA is almost complete! Tomorrow, January 18th, from 6-8, we have a closing reception in the gallery. Our thesis exhibition was written about favorably by James Wagner of Art Cat in a recent blog post. I like what he had to say about my work, especially his notion that it “addresses our ‘attachment’ to our environment, both the gifted and the corrupted”. Details about the final events of the show here.

Image:

Tributary Study: Calamity Brook/Henderson Lake (detail), 2009
18 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches
graphite on paper

Disparate Landscapes: Charles Burchfield and New Topograhics

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 08:22:00 +0100

I spent yesterday driving around Los Angeles with Dan, his sister Jen, and her boyfriend Jonathan. We were out to catch the final day of two exhibitions: Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, at the Hammer, and New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, at LACMA. We weren’t intending to see two landscape-based shows back to back, but I’m glad we did. Although the two exhibitions approach landscape from highly divergent perspectives, I found echoes of my own landscape investigations in each.

The Burchfield show, curated by Robert Gober, is romantic, expressive, and full of color. It includes a recreation of Burchfield’s 1930 exhibition at New York’s MoMA, the first solo show put on by the fledgling museum. It also follows Burchfield through his years working as a wallpaper designer, and his rise as part of American Scene Painting. For me, the most exciting part of the exhibition is the final room. Sparely hung, it is devoted to the large-scale watercolors Burchfield made in the final decades of his life. During these years (the 1950s and 60s) Burchfield broke his ties with American Scene Painting and returned to his youthful search for a romantic, direct connection with nature and his own experiences in it.

The paintings in this room radiate an exalted, ecstatic calm but also suggest a man deeply engaged in the world around him. They are both mundanely detailed and somehow sublime- we see cicada husks, dirt, river rocks, trees, flowers; but also calligraphic arcs of sound and shimmering forms suggesting light and energy. Entering this room I couldn’t help but think of the final segment of the recent Turner exhibition at the Met. Both artists seemed to find a sudden and extreme freedom in their later years, expanding upon a lifetime of painting with new passion and certainty. As Dan and I begin this new year (approaching our thirties and looking forward to a lifetime of creating) evidence of such long-lasting creative output is inspiring indeed.

In a very different vein, the photographers included in New Topographics attempt to approach landscape with an objective, impersonal eye. The LACMA exhibition is actually a “restaging” of the 1975 exhibition held at the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House. It includes now well-known topographic greats like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Adams and Stephen Shore, who participated in the 1975 exhibition, as well as additions like Robert Smithson and Dan Graham. The curators also commissioned a video installation from the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), whose contribution is the only contemporary work included.

As expected, the work in this exhibition takes a cool, analytic approach to landscape. Despite the emphasis on objectivity (and perhaps due to the lingering influence of Burchfield, which we saw first) I felt the sublime creep into this exhibition as well. In the work of Adams especially, I found an almost clinical sublime. He isolates and analyzes the landscapes he documents, but the images still retain a sense of the wild and the raw. In the case of CLUI, I see a combination of Burchfield and Adams. This sounds a bit illogical, but experiencing CLUI’s massive double video projection, drifting slowly over bleak scenes of oil fields in California and Texas, I felt a distinct sense of subjective passion infusing this objective “interpretation” of 21st Century Landscape.

update: another blog post/review of the show here.

Images:

Charles E. Burchfield, September Wind and Rain, 1949

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Loomis Coal Breaker/Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, 1974

Upcoming...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 23:11:50 +0100

The results of my stick/branch/twig gathering habits of the past year or so are going to be on view soon as part of my thesis exhibition. Dan and I are also at work on a web component for the show, which will live here eventually.

Autumn Colors

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:05:07 +0100

We took an amazing trip to upstate New York this past week. Most of the trip was concentrated near the heart of the Adirondack Park in the Huntington Wildlife Forest, but we also stopped through Albany on our rainy trip home, where I gathered a spectacular mix of sugar maple, norway maple, red oak and liquid amber leaves. More about the trip to come!