Gallery Talk & Exhibition Opening
Monday, January 7, 2013 – 6pm @ Santa Fe Art Institute
Shifting Baselines Exhibition
January 8 – 25 – Monday – Friday, 9am – 5pm @ Santa Fe Art Institute
Shifting Baselines, an exhibition curated by ecoartspace founder Patricia Watts, opening on the 7th of January, 2013, will show existing and new work from installation artist Hugh Pocock and painter Cynthia Hooper, a Northern California painter and video artist who teaches at College of the Redwoods in Eureka.
Shifting baseline is a scientific term used to describe the way changes in the environment can be measured against previous reference points (baselines) that represent significant changes from the “original state.” For example, places that swarmed with a particular species hundreds of years ago may have experienced long-term decline, but it is the level of recent decades that are considered the appropriate reference point for current populations. In this way large declines in ecosystems or species over long periods of time were, and are, masked. There is a loss of perception of change that occurs when each generation redefines what is “natural.” This term has become widely used to describe the shift over time in the expectation of what a healthy ecosystem baseline looks like.
The exhibition will also be the inaugural event of the Santa Fe Art Institute’s 2013-14 season of programming – Contested Space, focusing on arts role in communicating and exploring new territory in an already mapped out world.
To learn more about the Shifting Baselines residency and exhibition, please go to the ecoartspace blog and the Santa Fe Art Institute blog.
