April 11, 2016

Artists Redefine the Natural and Explore Relationship Between the City and Nature in Urbanature

Extended through July 3, 2016

Artists are redefining the natural and exploring how we perceive the eroding boundaries between nature and the city in an age of environmental change, crisis and impact. The exhibition, Urbanature, extended through July 3, 2016, presents work by urban artists who are seeking to define their relationship to nature.

Curated by L.A.-based artist and writer Constance Mallinson, Urbanature is open to the public at ArtCenter College of Design’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery located at 1700 Lida Street in Pasadena.

Artists featured in Urbanature are China Adams, Elizabeth Bryant, Laura Cooper and Nick Taggart, Merion Estes, Nancy Evans, Brian Forrest, James Griffith, Constance Mallinson, Ross Rudel, Fran Siegel, Linda Stark, Coleen Sterritt and Don Suggs.

ArtCenter’s Williamson Gallery is known for its exhibitions exploring the intersection of contemporary art, science and evolving perceptions of nature. Urbanature reinforces the gallery’s approach to how scientific knowledge and poetic appreciation can advance a critical understanding of the human-nature interrelationship.

For most of the world’s ever-growing human population, nature today is experienced within a new worldwide and human-made habitat of cities, suburbs, exurbs and infrastructure, all under relentless pressure from the byproducts of the human enterprise. Some argue that wilderness—“nature” in its most familiar form, pre-human and Edenic—is, in fact, gone forever from our earth. Yet nature persists, always adapting, appearing in new forms and unexpected ways.

Because older models are aligned with the dualisms that promote nature commodification and consumption, these newer representations eschew picturesque romantic pastoralism, deriving their images of the natural from a close involvement with their urban environs. They realize nature cannot be viewed in isolation from human wants, needs, activities and technologies, insisting on the fact that humans, even in sprawling cities like Los Angeles, are connected to a vast ecosystem.

ArtCenter College of Design’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery is located at 1700 Lida Street in Pasadena. For more information, contact williamson.gallery@artcenter.edu

Williamson Gallery hours:
12 to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday
12 to 9 p.m., Friday
Closed Mondays and holidays

Urbanature is made possible in part through the generosity of the Williamson Gallery Patrons and a grant from the Pasadena Art Alliance.

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Contact:

Teri Bond
Media Relations Director
ArtCenter College of Design
626.396.2385 office
teri.bond@artcenter.edu