BEARING WITNESS

October 1 - November 29, 2019

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88 cores      Peggy Weil

                +

Paradise and Its Dark Side

          C​lare Backer, Jerry Bates, John Berry, Garret L. Boone

          David Herrold, Robert Kingsley, William Meehan                                                                                George Jo Mess, Lori Miles, Martha Donovan Opdahl,

          Barbara Timm, A. Reid Winsey

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        Curated by Martha Donovan Opdahl 

         in Collaboration with Jerry Bates

BEARING WITNESS: “88 Cores” + Paradise and Its Dark Side is a visual art exhibition of place and time in which nature and culture intersect; the global and the local connect. LA artist Peggy Weil’s “88 Cores” video installation makes accessible to us ice cores from the  Greenland ice sheet showing global climate change starting from 1989 and going 2 miles deep and back 110,000 years to bedrock. This antique frozen water reveals seasonal, slow, cyclical climate change over long periods of time turned as if by alchemy into beautiful light. In the adjacent gallery, Paradise and Its Dark Side by contemporary area artists reveals the beauty of our local, glacier-carved, varied, and productive  landscape as we know it, love it, and live it here in fossil-strewn Putnam County. 

 

Yet, there’s now evidence of something new and foreboding happening which threatens our paradise. Worse, threatens our very survival. Humankinds’ survival. We risk losing it all. This dread, this feeling of things gone wrong, very wrong, our artists capture and reveal. We know what is causing this escalating change which we witness almost daily. The central issue of our time—rapid, human-induced climate change—around which the show was conceived, threatens the lives of our children and grandchildren.The growth and progress for humanity’s well-being which drove the past 200 years of industrialization, a product of fossil fuel based energy, has had destructive, unintended consequences on the environment which sustains us. For recorded rising temperatures of the atmosphere at unprecedented and alarmingly accelerated rates exacerbate natural forces of air, wind, fire, and water which, unless stopped, will lead to environmental catastrophe. This exhibition reminds us of what matters most to all of us—and that we care—which is essential for initiating dialogue and building trust. We know what’s broke. We know how to fix it. We fix it. Because we care.

 

 

                                                 BEARING WITNESS 

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                                    88 Cores     +     Paradise and Its                                     

                                                        Dark Side

                                             Peggy Weil              C​lare Backer, Jerry Bates, John Berry, Garret L. Boone

                                                         David Herrold, Robert Kingsley, William Meehan                                                                               George Jo Mess, Lori Miles, Martha Donovan Opdahl,

                                                         Barbara Timm, A. Reid Winsey

 

                                          

        This exhibition was presented in partnership with the Peeler Art Center,

                                  DePauw University, Greencastle Indiana.

         

Thank you to those who helped fund this exhibition by participating in our raffle.  

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