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FRAGILE NATURE:
Brent Bukowski & Kathryn Ward

Curated by Virginia Eichhorn

"Fragile Nature brings together the work of these two artists set up in such a way as to encourage discourse on the ideas and questions about landscape, nature and culture. Their complementary but divergent approach to these topics, and the contrast in how they incorporate glass, natural and industrial materials creates a dynamic exhibition with great appeal to a broad audience.

 Bukowski’s installation A Piece of the Pie examines the expansion of world consumption in a form that contrasts current statistical patterns to those of fifty years ago. This series identifies the wasteful use of resources, labour and capital and the consequential strains on the standard of living and the environment.

The individual sculptures comprising A Piece of the Pie employs the imagery of opposing pie charts in order to display and compare the statistical difference spanning the last 50 years. Variables explored include the consumption of natural resources, industrial output, population growth, food production and pollution. In order to create these “pie graphs” Bukowski layers broken and cut glass in and around metal assemblages. The frames are constructed in two parts using the circular metal lids of discarded hot water heaters. The two parts are then connected, creating a dynamic composition in metal and glass of the pattern in study.
  
Together the series of works display the increase in our patterns of consumption, its effects on the environment and the inequality of its distribution. As exhibited in the Bierstock Gallery A Piece of the Pie evokes the encroaching of industrial and urban development on the natural world. The concentrated arrangement of the sculptures underscores the depletion, destruction and decimation of natural resources. We are running out of space, out of resources, out of nature. And when they are gone, nothing will remain.

Kathryn Ward’s assemblages bring forth another aspect of the exploration of the significance of nature and landscape within our contemporary context.
                          
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       A Piece of the Pie                        PAGE 1 2 3 4 5
     
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World Fish Catch
1961-2001


 


 

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World Forest Production
1961-2002


 

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Coal Study
1965-2004

 

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Hydro-electricity Study
1965-2004


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