Resilience: A Living Room
Friday, Nov. 16, 2018 - Thursday, Jan. 10, 2019
Gallery Open: Thursday-Sunday 11 am - 4 pm
Kim Abeles will talk about her experiences as an artist in residence at the Institute of Forest Genetics (IFG) and ideas gained exploring the theme “resilience” in the context of forest ecosystems and as it relates to our lives. She’ll give a slide presentation showing a brief background of her community-based artworks that explore biography, geography, and environment. She has created projects with the California Science Center, air pollution control agencies, health clinics and mental health departments, and natural history museums in California, Colorado, and Florida. This new project combined six weeks of interactions with researchers at IFG and students from Independence High School. The resulting installation, Resilience: A Living Room is part forest and part living room. It refers to a space in a house where we can gather and communicate; and, poetically, it’s a room dedicated to the living.
El Dorado Arts Council, in collaboration with the Institute of Forest Genetics (IFG) in Placerville, embarked on a month-long residency with noted artist Kim Abeles. The project engaged students at Independence High School in Diamond Springs and concluded with an installation at the Confidence Lab.
Abeles spent a month at IFG working with and observing staff and events while exploring the topic of resilience and how it intersects with forest genetics research. Abeles also worked closely with art teacher Jennifer Tomei at Independence High School and, through a series of field trips and in-class projects, explored the topic of resilience with a group of students.
The result was an artistic project that examined and reflected the idea of “resilience” in all its complexity - as a scientific phenomenon, as a philosophical concept, and as a way of living.
Abeles received the 2013 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and is a recipient of fellowships from J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, California Community Foundation and Pollack-Krasner Foundation. Her work is in public collections including MOCA, LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, California African American Museum, and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Abeles’ journals, books, and process documents are archived at the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art.
