Lynn Richardson: Arctic Garden
February 3rd – March 10th, 2012
Reception: February 3rd @ 7pm
With renewed debates over rights to waterways and Arctic shipping routes a new era of colonization will soon begin. Using British colonialism as a metaphor for the potential exploitation of the Arctic, Richardson’s new work questions this relationship by assuming multiple forms reminiscent of the English Garden. Currently England contains over 20 million private gardens, and these heavily cultivated, controlled and contrived spaces magnificently display our constant desire to bend and manipulate nature. Although her work is intended to be playful, even humorous in order to soften the hard reality of the underlying message, it presents a critical examination of the dichotomy between nature and our industry driven culture and the devastating long-term effects our current courses of action will have on the environment.