Adriane Colburn: Ways, Points and Means' June 26, 2012

INSTALLATION
June 22–July 7
1:00–7:00 pm Wednesdays–Saturdays
SuperFrog Gallery
1746 Post Street (Webster/Buchannan)

Colburn is an artist who uses cut paper, video and still imagery to clarify how people overlay their imaginary relationship to the world over real places. Her recent work consists of large-scale installations that investigate the complex relationships between human infrastructure, technology and the natural world. These works, derived from scientific data, images and video collected through research and scientific expeditions, look at how mapping is used to investigate fragile and inaccessible ecosystems along the edges of the Earth’s last vestiges of wilderness. With Ways, Points and Means, Colburn draws on her recent experiences at sea, mining footage she collected while on an ice breaker on the Arctic Ocean and while at sea in the Amazon Plume off the coast of French Guyana. The works in the exhibition specifically focus on the sea as a persistently foreign body, an overlooked wilderness that one attempts to comprehend through technologies, optics and cartography. The primary tension in the show is between the sea as imaginary vs. real space, with special attention paid to it as an emergent fiction. By using an array of approaches to represent its vastness, Colburn presents a poetics of the ocean while asking us to recognize the inherent and threatened beauty of our shared environment.