Project Birch Forest: The Waste Land

Thursday, July 8, 2010 - Sunday, August 15, 2010
White Box
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 8, 2010, 7-9PM

Project/Concept Director: Tatyana Stepanova

Exhibition Design: Jee Won Kim

Curator: Raul Zamudio

Participating Artists:
Jaishri Abichandani

Luis Alonzo-Barkigia
China Blue
Gordon Cheung
Gabriel de la Mora
Liselot van der Heijden
Zhang Huan
Richard Humann
Ferran Martin
Tony Matelli
Damian Ontiveros
Kelly Richardson
Miguel Rodriguez Sepulveda
The Social Art Collective
Svai & Paul Stanikas
Tatyana Stepanova
Jorge Tacla
Mookie Tenembaum
Wojtek Ulrich
Abdul Vas
Ruben Verdu

The Waste Land is the inaugural exhibition of the Birch Forest Project series to be presented at White Box throughout the summer. The first iteration culls its title from T.S. Eliot's poem by the same name. Considered to be a milestone of twentieth-century modernist poetry, Eliot’s magnum opus is written in extended verse and mines a myriad of sources creating an open-ended, literary work par excellence. The poem is used as touchstone for a topical exhibition consisting of an array of media including painting, sculpture, work-on-paper, photography, video, and installation. One of its well known stanzas, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” has different connotations altogether within the backdrop of ecological and cataclysmic disaster underscored in the BP oil spill, Icelandic volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis. The Waste Land uses Eliot’s poem as a foil to dovetail on social and political issues endemic to our contemporary, globalized world. Artworks, however, are not presented via conventional modes of display, but are exhibited within a simulacrum of a primeval, arbor-like environment that constitutes the Birch Forest Project.


For more information, visit http://www.whiteboxny.org/projectbirchforest/