Carbon Copy

About the Exhibition

Months of conversations between artists Rosemary Holliday Hall, Joshua G. Stein (Radical Craft), and guest curator Kitty Ross revolved around notions of material in geologic, biologic, architectural, atmospheric, and ceramic iterations.

If the landscape consists of the earth and the atmosphere, architecture exists between the two. Material particles—animal, vegetable, and mineral—move between these realms, blurring the boundaries of each. Hardened compounds like limestone were once living creatures. Hermit crabs collect minerals and objects from their surroundings to shield their bodies in a protective enclosure. Humans dig vast pits to harvest materials to erect buildings of the very materials upon which their architecture stands. The cavities are then filled with debris, either deliberately or via the ongoing movement of particles, and the pit becomes a mound. Birds swallow gastroliths as a mechanism for grinding food in their gizzards. Whales, seals and crocodiles are also known to swallow gastroliths, perhaps to serve as ballast. The soft body of an oyster transforms mineral irritants into pearls. Conversely, body ‘stones’ such as gallstones, bladder stones and kidney stones are painful formations of somatic minerals. The human body is geology and, accordingly, we humans are geologic agents.

This exhibition is a poetic examination of the transference, atomization and tracing of materials over time, and a means of questioning how we live, build, make, and evolve in the Anthropocentric landscape.

About the Artists

Rosemary Holliday Hall is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, and performance. Hall's evolving projects draw attention to connections between more-than-human agencies and cultural ecologies to explore human's relationships with nature and culture. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA with a minor in Environmental Horticulture from the University of California, Davis. 

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington DC.  She is the recipient of multiple residencies, fellowships, and collaborative grants which include participation in the UC Davis Bilinski fellowship with PhD Candidate Tracie Hayes researching beetle scavengers, Ex.Change: Artist and Scientist on Climate Change grant and exhibition examining climate change in the Chicago region, Art, Science & Culture Initiative Collaboration Grant with PhD Predrag Popovic at the University of Chicago researching swarms and termites, Oxbow School of Art Fellowship, the Maria and Jan Manetti Shrem UC Davis Royal Drawing School Fellowship, and Vashon Artist in Residence. 

Hall is a Co-Founder of Viral Ecologies, a digital publication that focuses on human and more-than-human ecological entanglements, and Spore Space a tiny artist-run gallery in the Ojai Valley, CA. Hall is the recent recipient of the first Artist Researcher in Residence at Taft Botanical Gardens in Ojai, where she currently resides.

Joshua G. Stein is the founder of Radical Craft, a Los Angeles-based studio that advances an experimental art and design practice saturated in history, archaeology, and craft. This inquiry inflects the production of urban spaces and artifacts by evolving newly grounded approaches to the challenges posed by virtuality, velocity, and globalization. His recent projects reimagine the construction and resource extraction industries as anthropogenic geological processes while investigating new applications for earthen materials. Joshua G. Stein has received numerous grants, awards, and fellowships, including multiple grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the AIA Upjohn research award, the European Commission’s Science+Technology+Arts initiative, and the 2010-11 Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture. He is Professor of Architecture at Woodbury University.

About the Curator

As a ceramic sculptor, Katherine Ross is interested in the historical role of porcelain as a status symbol valued for purity and strength, elegance and propaganda.  Her work has always been concerned with the complex relationship we have to this material and the subtle, coded ways it operates within our culture.  Her expertise is in ceramic production for large installations addressing biological technology, disease and prophylaxis, notions of the obsolete and personal histories.  Currently, she is writing a book related to her family history.

Katherine has been a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago faculty since 1981, serving also as the decades-long Chair of the Ceramics Department and Interim Dean of Graduate Studies. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1976 from the State University of New York at Fredonia and her MFA in 1980 from Tulsa University. 

Katherine has exhibited across the world from the Jingdezhen National Ceramic Museum to The Centers For Disease Control Museum in Atlanta. She is the recipient of many awards at local, state, and national levels, including an Arts Midwest/NEA Grant and being recognized as a Walter Gropius Master Artist for 2012 by the Huntington Museum. Her work is published widely in periodicals and books on ceramic art in the U.S., Great Britain, China, Australia, and Switzerland. Katherine has also worked with several architects including Michael Graves to produce porcelain objects for the Taubman/Kalisman residence, and Ullman and Fil Architects to restore terra cotta facades, as well as numerous others on residential and restoration projects.