The Everhart Museum is creating a new exhibit called BUDS, BLOOMS & BERRIES: Plants in Science, Culture & Art, featuring the Museum’s collection of plant specimens and cultural objects, as well as contemporary art on loan from across the country. This exhibit opens August 12 and will be on display through December 31, 2011. As part of this exclusive exhibit, contemporary artist Gabrielle Senza is creating an installation on one of the gallery walls. Her temporary wall drawing will highlight the ephemeral nature of the world as reflected in the need for environmental awareness.
The artwork Terra Temporalis by Gabrielle Senza is the Everhart Museum’s first foray into installation art. For more than 100 years we have served Northeast Pennsylvania as a venue for educational exhibits and programs on natural science, ethnography, fine art, folk art, and conservation. Yet, we have never hosted or produced an on-site ephemeral art installation as part of an exhibition.
The propsed wall drawing, Terra Temporalis, will be approximately 11 x 17 feet, similar to the artist’s oil on canvas painting The Promise of Light – X. The work will be created in varied tones of graphite grey, as it will be done with powdered graphite applied directly to the wall.
This large-scale, site-specific wall drawing will highlight an important concept in contemporary art and environmental conservation: time. Time is of the essence in experiencing art (contemporary and historic) but it is also transient and critical to an understanding of the need to re-focus and halt global environmental degradation and devastation.
Terra Temporalis represents the fleeting nature of time, as well as a disappearing environment. At the end of the exhibit, the gallery walls will be returned to their original state and the work will be gone, existing only in memory and visual documentation.
Gabrielle Senza is an internationally-recognized artist whose work explores the miracles of nature, time and personal journeys throughout her prolific career as a multi-media artist and activist. She is also a social and environmental activist, whose installation and multi-media work conveys powerful messages that raise awareness and help to inspire change. Senza writes, “Drawing on the temporal aspect of our fragile planet and the sometimes desperate feeling I get when I am aware of the fleeting beauty that is around us, Temporalis – itself fleeting and beautiful seeks to convey the ephemeral nature of the world around us. The contemplative, silent grandeur of Nature, sitting so beautifully beside us, is vulnerable – so vulnerable – it hurts to think about it.”
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