Chasing Trails

Ben Hirschkoff & Libby Gerber

Reception & Artist Talk:
Thursday April 10th, 6:00-9:00pm

From February 27 – April 12, ArtsWest Gallery presents Chasing Trails, featuring work by Libby Gerber and Ben Hirschkoff. Please join us for the reception on Thursday April 10^th from 6:00-9:00pm, which will include informal artist talks at 7:00pm.

Each of Libby Gerber’s map-like accordion-fold books is an ornate drawing of a crack in something: a foundation, sidewalk, freeway or skyscraper. This series of work, called The Topography of Cracks, is one of the ways Gerber uses her art practice to explore the distinctions we perceive between the “natural” and man-made worlds.

With his tape collages of cartoonish cloud-like shapes and his mad-scientist-in-the-basement moving sculptures of clouds and weather systems, Ben Hirschkoff borrows archetypal symbols of nature to create objects that bask in their own unnaturalness.

Together, Hirschkoff and Gerber ask us to look at what happens in the space between things and what’s left over when the subject of the action is missing. We’re made to wonder about what caused this ambiguous imagery that doubles as evidence: What caused this plume of smoke, or video-game-like cumulous nimbus suspended in a sky-less plane? Are these cracks in cement any different from the geological fractures they reference?  Is there a consequence?  Are we the protagonists?–or are we stuck, like the remnant cracks and clouds, in these “absurd constructions between defined spaces”? (Hirschkoff)

– Susanna Bluhm, Gallery Director