25 Sep 2018

Be Here Now

Beacon Gallery

Reviewed by Daniel Perez

In a piece which mixes the digital and the physical, Raquel Fornasaro and Wendy Shapiro begin a dialogue. Shapiro's whiteseascape is a bleak, textured landscape created with eco-friendly materials that the artist mixes herself. It acts as the stage for Fornasaro's digital loop Tree Glitch, which flashes, as if its data were corrupted, between the image of an idyllic, blossoming tree and another of highway power lines. (All works are from 2018.)

This exhibition explores humanity's relationship with nature - the reverence of the Romanticist authors, the Industrial Revolution's idealizations of capitalism, and our current desire to find a middle ground between them in renewable resources such as wind energy. This combination of solo and collaborative works shows how two disparate styles can combine to create unexpected and profound meanings that encourage consciousness of the space we inhabit, to be here now.