The Transformative Power of Art (Summer Newsletter Addendum)

Summer Addendum

2009

Hi all:

I have one more special interest story that I just found out about and had to share.

Artist Ryan Burns is using his art and the ECO-CELL program as a way to draw attention to the serious issues around conflict resources and to enable his visitors to participate in conservation. When I first heard about his project "Profane Relics: An Ossuary of the Congo Mineral Wars," I thought how great it would be if it could be exhibited in participating Zoos in the US and Canada. It is a powerful call to action.

In the meantime, check out the exhibit if you are in Portland (location and times at link below) and feel free to comment on Ryan's art and his social and environmental initiave at the exhibit web page.

Sincerely,

Eric Ronay

"Profane Relics: An Ossuary of the Congo Mineral Wars"- An Art Exhibit

In the SEA (Social Evironment Art) Change Gallery, Ryan Burns has created an installation that examines the price paid for high-tech gadgetry. An immense crate has been prized open to reveal an archaeological transect: a ten-foot square block of red soil, whose strata have been treated to reveal objects contained in the matrix. These objects tell the story of the past twenty years of war and mineral exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The artifacts and waste of cultural disarticulation and total war lie with the crude hand-tools of small pit mining; traces of the bushmeat trade jumbled together with discarded high-tech ephemera, smartphones and laptops, whose capacitors are assembled of Congolese coltan. Who threw these away? Lost them? Who dug them up?

Profane Relics art exhibit

Ryan Burns mines history for his environmental art. His old growth tree-stump rubbings and quasi-archaeological installations chronicle human exploitation of the natural world, excavating the future and mapping the past through large-scale works. He examines the traces left behind by time-based processes of growth and history, and catalogues the damage done.

He has exhibited work nationally in several universities and galleries. He is the recipient of two Puffin Foundation grants, and a RACC grant which funds this project. His art is represented by the Augen gallery in Portland and Barrister's gallery in New Orleans.

The gallery will host ECO-CELL drop boxes for the month of July, where used or unwanted cellphones can be deposited for recycling.

For more information on coltan and the Congo, watch "The Real Mobile Phone Wars - DRC by Journeyman Pictures." Also check out Afshin Rattansi's report on U.S. involvement in the Congo and the credit crunch.

The Tranformative Power of Art

"The challenges of the next century must be met by citizens with enormous energy and a well developed capacity for imaginative discipline. Our communities need creative pioneers, adept at risk taking, challenging assumptions and questioning conventional wisdom. This is the domain of the artist: listening, translating, borrowing and synthesizing. The creator takes the old and new and links them. He or she celebrates the common threads and the dissonance, reflects our triumphs, our pain, our folly, creating fresh images and giving new vision. This is the creative process. This is the territory of the artist."

-William Cleveland

"Nothing really holds us back from solutions to our world dilemas, except the lid we have put on our own creativity. Opening ourselves to the creative force within allows us to envision the possible. Envisioning the possible excites our will and determination to create it."

- Natalie Rogers