formerly: Rubber Factory
full archive here
full archive here
upcoming 10-25-2024 to 12-21-2024
Alex Callender, night grass
Shuyi Cao, and when the sea was open
reception from 6 to 8 pm
Alex Callender, night grass
Shuyi Cao, and when the sea was open
reception from 6 to 8 pm
night grass
Alex Callender
October 25 – December 21, 2024
We are thrilled to present night grass, Alex Callender’s second solo exhibition with island, featuring a new body of small and large scale oil paintings.
In these works, narrative acts as a collection of spectral encounters, with visual references to historical material from transatlantic trade and industrial agriculture of the Jacksonian era. The Views of North America, a panoramic wallpaper printed in 1836 by the French Zuber Company, depicts six idealized American pastoral New England and New York Landscapes. As middle-class and multi-racial populace stroll through the scenic, illustrated vignettes, we view an idealized historical fantasy that promotes an image of American military spectacle and tourism, territorial expansion, and class prosperity. However, a more complicated narrative is unveiled in Zuber’s grassy views, one that reveals the colonized plantation geography of the Caribbean to be a shadowy doppelganger of the American Northeast’s economic abundance. In the waterline at the center of the myth, a view of Boston’s colonial harbor opens up into an alternate Atlantic space, exposing rising waters that flowed and intimately entwined New England to the slave societies of the Caribbean. Botanical renderings of native grasses and pages of merchant ledger books also appear throughout the work. Within the deep blue landscapes, social and ecological histories become unsettled and intertwined, sometimes interrupted by the presence of ghostly figures. Callender meditates on this shrouded historical memory and the ways in which the connecting lines between colonialism and American economic history become visible.
Callender poses a question surrounding migration: What plants become entangled in stories of human violence? In unsettling palimpsest, even haunts the grass, a scene of families promenading around West Point military academy from Views of North America is imposed as a ground or foundational myth, now covered by a mix of wild aster, turf, and bluestem grass. The appearances of these varied plant species tell a story of absence and presence, plantation, industry, monoculture, and the many migrations instigated both by force and by chance. Callender calls attention to wild grass as well as their industrialized counterparts. Frequently drought resistant and integral to pollination and soil restoration, grasses tell a necessary story about our future and ecological transformation. They tell another story simultaneously: we live between the haunted waterlines of the Atlantic world, a place where the ongoing legacies of colonial land management are still embedded within our shared landscapes.
Alex Callender works in drawing, painting, and installation to trace and remap historical materials as a means to explore with both criticality and care, how we might disentangle the interwoven relations of race, gender, and capitalism. Drawing largely from archival sources my work engages with mythic and residual forms of coloniality to think about ways that we orient ourselves to the past. Using different visual modes of annotation, hybrid narratives, and speculative storytelling, she recontextualizes static (or seemingly fixed) renderings of history to consider their relationship to social forces like scale, time, and memory. Callender has had recent solo exhibitions at Northeastern University (MA), NYU Gallatin Galleries (NY), the Rubber Factory (NY), Michigan State University, and a public work project at UMass Amherst. Often following a research-based process, she has held residencies with the The Schomburg Center in New York, MacDowell Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Drawing Center’s Open Session program, the Art in Embassies Program, Santa Fe Art Institute, The Vermont Studio Center, Urban Glass, Alice Yard in Trinidad, and DRAWinternational and The BAU Institute in France. Raised in New York City, Callender now lives in western Massachusetts and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Smith College.
In these works, narrative acts as a collection of spectral encounters, with visual references to historical material from transatlantic trade and industrial agriculture of the Jacksonian era. The Views of North America, a panoramic wallpaper printed in 1836 by the French Zuber Company, depicts six idealized American pastoral New England and New York Landscapes. As middle-class and multi-racial populace stroll through the scenic, illustrated vignettes, we view an idealized historical fantasy that promotes an image of American military spectacle and tourism, territorial expansion, and class prosperity. However, a more complicated narrative is unveiled in Zuber’s grassy views, one that reveals the colonized plantation geography of the Caribbean to be a shadowy doppelganger of the American Northeast’s economic abundance. In the waterline at the center of the myth, a view of Boston’s colonial harbor opens up into an alternate Atlantic space, exposing rising waters that flowed and intimately entwined New England to the slave societies of the Caribbean. Botanical renderings of native grasses and pages of merchant ledger books also appear throughout the work. Within the deep blue landscapes, social and ecological histories become unsettled and intertwined, sometimes interrupted by the presence of ghostly figures. Callender meditates on this shrouded historical memory and the ways in which the connecting lines between colonialism and American economic history become visible.
Callender poses a question surrounding migration: What plants become entangled in stories of human violence? In unsettling palimpsest, even haunts the grass, a scene of families promenading around West Point military academy from Views of North America is imposed as a ground or foundational myth, now covered by a mix of wild aster, turf, and bluestem grass. The appearances of these varied plant species tell a story of absence and presence, plantation, industry, monoculture, and the many migrations instigated both by force and by chance. Callender calls attention to wild grass as well as their industrialized counterparts. Frequently drought resistant and integral to pollination and soil restoration, grasses tell a necessary story about our future and ecological transformation. They tell another story simultaneously: we live between the haunted waterlines of the Atlantic world, a place where the ongoing legacies of colonial land management are still embedded within our shared landscapes.