Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/24/2025 - 03/08/2025
12:00 am
Location
Buffalo Arts Studio
Categories
Opening Reception, Friday, January 24, 2025, 5:00—8:00 pm
Part of M&T Bank 4th Friday @ Tri-Main Center
The collaborative team Bartow+Metzgar+Werberig conducted a multi-year experimental drawing project to investigate the expression of time through a human-nonhuman drawing collaboration with trees. Their investigative process began in 2016 with a simple question — what is a nonhuman expression of time as it relates to the Erie Canal? The outcome produced 40 tree drawings (drawings made by trees) created with a simple drawing apparatus used to record atmospheric forces affecting a tree across time for a specific place. The artist team selected trees along the banks of the Erie Canal and its connected waterways. No two drawings are alike but when viewed as a collective offer a legibility that is provocative and speculative, and best perceived as perturbations rather than abstractions.
New York State’s Erie Canal is 351 miles long and runs from Albany, NY to Buffalo, NY. The canal is, in large part, a public space. It offers an ideal condition of the “commons,” a space where the artist team could conduct their work without the hindrance of land ownership, accessibility, or trespass to land.