Overwinter: Alex Branch
Feb. 15-Mar. 8
Reception Feburary 15th, 3-5 pm
Following an injury, Alex Branch was driven to make sculptures that appear to trap her body in ice and to film her movements. Branch explores ice as material and water as a metaphor for bodily existence. Time and the cycles of nature are embedded in water’s changing states. The exhibition includes video, photo, and melting ice sculpture.
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Note: Alex Branch’s and Pablo Cazares’s work will now appear sequentially rather than in the same paired exhibition. See The cocoon tightens for Cazares exhibition.
Branch is an interdisciplinary artist whose work often requires or implies the involvement of a human body to activate and realize the piece. The objects and installations she makes can be architectural, acoustic, kinetic. A person can be housed inside them, traverse the water in them. They can be worn or flipped through. They can be played or simply looked at but even in the looking, the body is imagined.
Her interest in transformation can be traced back to her childhood growing up on an island in the Pacific Northwest. As a child, she was fascinated by the mysterious objects that would wash ashore from unknown places, some from the natural world, and others that were human made but had been transformed by their time in the water. Barnacles and seaweed would attach to these objects, changing them into hybrids. “When I work with found objects in the present day, they carry with them a residue of a life lived. It’s not possible to know exactly where the objects have been, or who interacted with them, but the fullness and richness of their experience resonates.”
Overwintering is the process by which plants, animals and insects brace for, and survive the harsh winter months when food supplies are low and conditions are extreme. Plants store food in their root systems and become dormant. Insects bore into the ground, trees or buildings to escape extreme cold and enter a pupae state. Warm blooded animals hibernate or stockpile food and retreat into dens and burrows.
Curatorial Statement: On Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
- Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”
Fire and ice, wind and water, sun and rain – these basic natural events shape everything from food supplies to our daily habits. A powerful force, ice compels deep metaphorical associations in culture and religion. Ice speaks of large scales of time: permafrost hold years of winter; glacial ice contains millennia within its layers.
In his poem, Frost associates ice with hate and destruction. Ice intimidates us for good reasons. The cold endangers to our fragile bodies. We are weaker than the weak hydrogen bonds between water molecules. On ice, we can slip and break. An event like this inspired Branch to begin her work with ice.
But as a creative exploration, Branch’s work also alludes to the generative power of ice. Ice shapes the earth. It makes it ready for growth. As she explains in her statement, there are seeds that depend on ice for germination.
Currently, our natural world depends on the stability of ice. The disappearance of ice means the end of our world — in fire, as Frost envisions.
photos by Stefan Gonzales