Edge Effects: Christine Howard Sandoval & Leah Raintree
King Street Gallery, Montgomery College
September 24 -October 15, 2015
Edge Effects is an exhibition of two site-based projects by artists Christine Howard Sandoval and Leah Raintree, focused on the landscape of southern Colorado following a series of wildfires and low lying coastal areas in New York City following Hurricane Sandy. In ecology, edge effects refer to zones of influence where ecological communities affect one another along the boundary of landforms, such as forests and grasslands or the land and the sea. Edge Effects takes inspiration from these locations of overlap and influence, exploring climatic effects along interstitial zones. Edge Effects investigates the intersection of developed and wild environments, natural and anthropogenic forces, and the cross-pollination between artistic practices that engage the environment, site-specific research, mark making, and embodiment in distinct yet interconnected ways. Edge Effects focuses on mark making within these overlapping zones, allowing acts of observation, navigation, site survey, and remediation to generate maps of varying forces and vulnerabilities. The exhibition moves across media, including process-based and site-specific drawings, video and photography.
Sandoval presents a body of work sited in the southern region of Colorado, where an influx of wildfires have become an increasing threat to expanding urban centers in the area during a prolonged drought that has permanently altered the region’s water supply. For this project Sandoval recorded walks in a burn scar area in the Waldo Canyon region using a wearable camera. While doing fieldwork, she recorded interviews of local people about their personal relationship to the landscape of the region, perspectives on drought, and visions of future. The audio recordings were transcribed and used to create a script that the artist re-performed herself and recorded as the audio track for Sonar, a single track video and audio piece that examines the psychological terrain of a community facing the complexities of a quickly changing environment. The video is accompanied by a large scale wall drawing executed with the charred pieces of tree limbs collected from the burn site. The exhibition also includes two schematic map sculptures that examine formal and historical aspects of suburban design and the desire for a controlled sense of the natural.
Raintree presents three bodies of work focused on low-lying areas in New York City following Hurricane Sandy, documenting the overlap of natural and manmade forces within densely populated coastal areas. Rockaway is a series of photographs taken as the beaches of Rockaway, Queens were remediated following the storm, excavating domestic and industrial materials embedded within the sand. Shot from Raintree’s perspective looking down, the images frame objects uncovered along bulldozer paths as they are simultaneously revealed and dissolve along the beaches. Front focuses on the interior of Raintree’s domestic space in the Historic Seaport District in Lower Manhattan during eight months of displacement following the storm. The neighborhood received up to seven feet of tidal flooding during Hurricane Sandy; submerging an area of mid 19th century mercantile buildings, entirely built on landfill, back under water. Front references her street in the Seaport and weather patterns that influenced the storm, with photographs that disrupt presumed boundaries of domestic spaces. Quiet Season is a series ofintimate drawings produced on walks along the New York Harbor during the 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season, projected to be a quiet season. These intricate works were produced following Raintree’s return home, revisiting the physicality of the harbor waters from various points along the harbor’s edge.
