Mixed Greens is thrilled to present Joseph Smolinski’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. He will exhibit drawing, sculpture, and video related to the environment and the power struggles between nature and technology.
This new body of work marks the expansion of Smolinski’s focus. Over the past few years, Smolinski created a world in which cellular communication towers disguised as trees infiltrated the landscape. There, technology proved victorious through these hybrid forms. In the new works, Smolinski visualizes a turning of the tide, where animals and nature play more active roles in their fate.
A new series of drawings, titled Disconnected, directly pits animals against the parasitic cell-tower trees. Here Smolinski envisions a time when the animals decide to reclaim their habitats. And in related projects such as Taking Back the Jetty and Cemetery (no doubt influenced by oil companies’ recent attempts to exploit the site of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty), Smolinski questions both the history and preservation of art and the environment as we exhaust our supply of cheap fuel.
Finally, in an installation titled Broken Bough, a tree limb with an attached cell tower seems to have crashed through the gallery wall. Still blinking, the tower appears a casualty, struggling to survive; it’s metal leaves wilted and crumbling.
Beginning of the End brings these projects together to reflect on our current interactions with the landscape. It poses questions related to our constant struggle to control the environment and imagines an optimistic, though sometimes apocalyptic, view of the future.
Joseph Smolinski lives and works in New Haven, CT. He received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin and his MFA from the University of Connecticut, Storrs (2001). In 2009 alone, he was featured in eleven exhibitions. Group exhibition venues include Diverse Works in Houston, TX (2009); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2008/2009); the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT (2004, 2008); McDonough Museum of Art, Youngstown, OH (2007); the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2007); The Cleveland Institute of Art (2005); and the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT (2004). Solo exhibition venues include Swarm Gallery in Oakland, CA (2009); Seton Gallery at the University of New Haven in CT (2009); Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT (2006); and ArtSpace in New Haven, CT (2004). His first solo exhibition in New York City was at Mixed Greens in 2007.
