Mixed Greens

MAY 3–JUNE 2, 2012
OPENING: THURSDAY, MAY 3, 6-8PM

Mixed Greens is presenting two concurrent solo exhibitions: Kimberley Hart - Promise and Jenna Spevack - Eight Extraordinary Greens.

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Kimberley Hart
Promise

Mixed Greens is thrilled to announce Kimberley Hart’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Promise consists of new drawings and sculptures in which Hart presents various narratives connected by themes of autonomy, reliance, opportunism, and intrusion, all intimately tied to notions of place and family.

For Promise, Hart has constructed a number of elaborate birdhouses inspired by the Purple Martin “condos” popularized by the Amish community. Farmers attract flocks of these fairly tame, natural insecticides to their specifically proportioned houses with the unusual result of the species becoming completely reliant on humans for housing. Its rival, the Starling, is a common nuisance and an invasive species. They are crevice nest builders and not only harass Martins for their choice nesting sites but notoriously take up
residence in peoples attics, barns, and wood piles with their large and unruly nests.

Hart built these Martin Houses using both Amish specifications and the traditional farmstead vernacular. The white clapboard-sided farmhouse, red barn, sheds, and coops, all bursting with nest material, stand overhead on steel posts. The adjacent log pile, made from recycled paper, delights with fantastic colored growth rings. Although we never see the Starlings, their intrusion is evident. Touching on notions surrounding the confluence of the built and natural worlds, Hart creates an allegory inspired by her son’s namesake, the Starling.

Hart’s drawings, masterfully rendered in colored pencil, display scenes from two timelines. In one narrative, a shiny airstream trailer shows signs of a fruitful, albeit constricted, living situation. A built-on extension and a tiny tricycle are evidence of an expanding family. A Starling assembles a nest in a long forgotten tree stump. Within the parallel timeline exists a storybook land in which Hart imagines milkmaids laying siege on a Dairy Queen’s castle. Farm animals and equipment elaborate on Hart’s associations with both sides of a battle over milk.

The recurring reference to Starlings and nest-making efforts straddles both timelines. It stands in as a metaphor for a new addition to a family—ironically looked upon as a resident invasive species. Promise is a simulation of the artist coming to terms with her new maternal role—full of fairytale romanticism, forced labor, nest-building, and open-ended visions of the future.

Download the press release here.

Jenna Spevack
Eight Extraordinary Greens

Mixed Greens is delighted to announce a solo exhibition by Jenna Spevack. Using installation, sculpture, and permaculture design, she will activate the gallery space into a living urban farm. Her aim: to provide healthy greens to extraordinary people with ordinary incomes. Through interactions with gallery visitors, Eight Extraordinary Greens will explore the value placed on food while simultaneously questioning the value placed on acts of artistic social practice within a gallery context.

Spevack started experimenting with apartment-sized farming by converting her own bookshelf into a mini greenhouse and designing an efficient, sub-irrigated system for growing energy-packed plants (microgreens). To suggest a feeling of domesticity similar to her original experiment, the gallery will display household objects (such as a suitcase, a chair, and a kitchen cabinet) modified with planters and lights to house the “microfarms.” A small farm stand (a desk and large bookshelf, alive with growing plants) will serve
as a space for the harvest and sale of eight different types of microgreens.

The installation will also be staged with references to Aesop’s fable “The Cock and the Jewel,” a riddle about relative value. In the story, a cockerel searching for food finds a precious gem but rejects it, wishing for corn instead.

Unlike most exhibitions where an art object is given a retail value and worth is assessed by the gallery in advance, visitors will determine the monetary value of the microgreens and the money will help support local, urban agriculture groups, such as Added Value and Bed Stuy Campaign Against Hunger. Participants will have the choice of whether to take the greens that they’ve purchased or leave them to be donated to a local food pantry. These transactions will be recorded in the form of a “receipt”—a print signed by both the consumer and artist. The consumer will receive one copy of the receipt and a duplicate will be hung in the gallery to record the collective value of the exchanges over the course of the exhibition. As an urban agricultural design experiment, Spevack envisions a way to grow food in an anthropogenic landscape for all strata of citizens. As an art exhibition, she hopes to facilitate conversations about what we value: creative effort versus convenience, regenerables versus disposables, neighbors versus strangers.

As an urban agricultural design experiment, Spevack envisions a way to grow food in an anthropogenic landscape for all strata of citizens. As an art exhibition, she hopes to facilitate conversations about what we value: creative effort versus convenience, regenerables versus disposables, neighbors versus strangers.

Materials and services to realize this exhibition will be donated, bartered, or salvaged. Special thanks to the following companies and individuals: Pegasus Lighting, High Mowing Organic Seeds, Organic Mechanics Soil Company, Al Attara of 33 Flatbush, Designer Jeanne Lynch, and all of Spevack’s Kickstarter backers. If you would like to support this project, please visit: http://8extraordinarygreens.com

Download the press release here.
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