German-born artist, Artemis Herber, is an award-winning artist in both mediums of sculpture and painting. Being of Greek heritage, she developed concepts on how humans live in shared spheres towards current conditions on Earth in the context of polit-myth. In her work she explores how humans have affected the Earth’s critical zone of our biosphere embedded in the field of polit-myth and experimental geography (practices that take on the production of space in a self-reflexive way, practices that recognize that cultural production and the production of space cannot be separated from each other, and that cultural and intellectual production is a spatial practice).
Alchemy of Art is pleased to present Beneath the Present, a solo exhibition of Greek-German born artist Artemis Herber. Combining projection, sculpture, and drawings, Herber’s work peers into her heritage, excavating concepts of ancient myths especially female repression utilizing it as a lens to view our current climate emergency.
Including four bodies of work, the exhibition features cardboard, brown packing paper, clay tiles sourced from Montegiovi, Tuscany, and deep time materials and aggregates such as charcoal, marble dust, tar, and plaster.
Her most recent work is a new series made at the La Baldi Residency, organized by Cultivate Projects, and extends into diverse practices, creating a series of drawings on locally found clay tiles that featured the visage of a 1000-year-old olive tree. While there, Herber formed kinship with the tree and the cultivated land of the region to delve deeper into meaning between growth, transformation, and resilience of species that have survived wars, societal change and the risk to have been depleted.
Herber’s Dryads series presents individual human-tree hybrids exploring possibilities to re-connect with and become closer to nature. The casted body parts conveyed into paper molds have been fused with dead branches bringing to life hybrid configurations at a precarious and fragile state of being. For months Herber applied endless paper lengths around dead wood, bringing to life visages of what we have lost — our deep connection with nature.
In the darkened front space of the gallery is Herber’s “Aiaia” a video projecting on top of a large scale wall work inspired by architectural sketches of heavy concrete water breakers dumped into coastlines against storms and floods as an environmental defense system. Named after Aiaia, the goddess-sorceress of Circe who used witchcraft to create invisible defensive barriers against unwanted intruders. For Herber, the concept of Aiaia represents a feminist vision of nature fighting back and protecting itself from men’s consumption.
The imagery used in Herber’s Lekythos series, large-scale framed paintings done on cardboard, references the ancient Greek funerary practice of the same name – similar to an urn. This use of death imagery – combined with the selected mythologies – speaks to our current crisis not only for humans but every Earthbounder.
Beneath the Present brings these four bodies of Herber’s work together to activate the first step in any process of change – brainstorming and conversation – through the lens of ecofeminism.
