BEA FREMDERMAN & ANDREW LAUMANN, Machine in the Garden
installation view at Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore, March – April 2016

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BEA FREMDERMAN & ANDREW LAUMANN, Machine in the Garden
installation view at Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore, March – April 2016

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BEA FREMDERMAN
Untitled, 2016
found Clothing, sprouts, dimensions variable

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BEA FREMDERMAN & ANDREW LAUMANN, Machine in the Garden
installation view at Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore, March – April 2016

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BEA FREMDERMAN
Untitled, 2016
found Clothing, sprouts, dimensions variable

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BEA FREMDERMAN & ANDREW LAUMANN, Machine in the Garden
installation view at Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore, March – April 2016

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BEA FREMDERMAN
Untitled, 2016
found Clothing, sprouts, dimensions variable

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BEA FREMDERMAN
Untitled, 2016
locally sourced stones, locally sourced sticks

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BEA FREMDERMAN & ANDREW LAUMANN, Machine in the Garden
installation view at Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore, March – April 2016

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BEA FREMDERMAN & ANDREW LAUMANN, Machine in the Garden
installation view at Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore, March – April 2016

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BEA FREMDERMAN & ANDREW LAUMANN, Machine in the Garden
installation view at Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore, March – April 2016

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BEA FREMDERMAN
Untitled, 2016
found Clothing, sprouts, dimensions variable

all images courtesy of the artists and Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore

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Machine in the Garden fluidly combines the work of BEA FREMDERMAN, which consists of an ephemeral sprouts installation, with a series of wall pieces by ANDREW LAUMANN.

While FREMDERMAN is using found garments to grow sprouts, ANDREW LAUMANN‘s works look like scratch posters you can find in the streets. These composition are made by tearing off layers of sheets of papers that have been previously glued together. Both artists are creating works in which natural elements follow artificial processes, and in which the passage of time acquires a fundamental role, if not a certain vandalistic tendency.

Thanks to its title and the works presented, one can find similarity to what CAROLYN CHRISTOV-BAKARGIEV wrote in her essay Worldly Worlding: The Imaginal Fields of Science / Art and Making Patterns Together (Mousse Magazine #43):

(..) I argue instead (as I also argued with dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012) for a broader vision of the situation, and for alliances between art and organic life, new materialisms, and scientific studies, so that forms of art and forms of life can be combined, sharing architectural and creative knowledge with bees and butterflies and beavers, with bacteria and microbes, with eukaryotic cells as well as with software; cobbling together desires, sensibilities and abilities on a par with the microcosmic world within our bodies and the macrocosmic “music of the spheres” in a multi-species dimension, extending the “we” to all living sentient beings (Margulis, Tristan Garcia). This neocybernetic, ecological perspective is committed to pleasure, imagination, sensuality, expression, and play, joined to a sense of justice in the world, foregrounding diversity, complexity, depth, appreciation, equanimity, and compassion, rather than the depletion of the world’s potential, stupidity, fascism, extinction, monoculture, unhappiness, fear, conflict, suicide, the death drive, and the exercise of hoarding, control, and power. This is not a “naturistic” backlash against the urban or the artificial, a turn which would simply be neo-Romantic, even detrimental to the scope of becoming-with, and of doing so outside the frames of current production/distribution/finance systems. It is not that I celebrated “Nature” in some neo-Romantic way in dOCUMENTA (13). It’s more that there is no difference between nature and culture. Even a painting is made of subatomic particles that go through certain reactions in space. So a painting is not exactly a human-made thing, but the fruit of combined agencies (Latour). It is only partially a human-made thing. Anything that’s in the world comes from something else, so everything is culture, or everything is nature, depending on how you wish to define these words.

Machine in the Garden by BEA FREMDERMAN and ANDREW LAUMANN is currently presented at Springsteen Gallery in Baltimore until April 23, 2016.

 

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