Fritz Haeg
dal 25/1/2008 al 15/3/2008
Segnalato da
25/1/2008
Fritz Haeg
AMOA-Arthouse - The Jones Center, Austin
Attack on the Front Lawn surveys a number of ecological initiatives recently completed by the Los Angeles-based artist and architect known for his socially-responsive and community-oriented practice. This exhibition brings together photographic and video documentation from Haeg's ongoing Edible Estates project along with ephemeral items and site-specific elements.
Fritz Haeg: Attack on the Front Lawn surveys a number of ecological initiatives recently completed by the Los Angeles-based artist and architect known for his socially-responsive and community-oriented practice. Working at the intersection of art and social activism, Haeg engages audiences in collaborative conversations and encounters that often take place outside of the institutional confines of a museum or gallery. This exhibition brings together photographic and video documentation from Haeg’s ongoing Edible Estates project (see below) along with ephemeral items and site-specific elements created by the artist for Arthouse’s space that relate to gardening and sustainable food production in Austin. For the duration of the exhibition, Arthouse has transformed itself into a community resource center, schoolhouse, working greenhouse, and finally, laboratory for artistic experimentation. This umbrella exhibition provides context for two related projects—the Sundown Schoolhouse and Edible Estates—that Haeg has developed for Austin.
The Sundown Schoolhouse: How to Eat Austin
Conceived and led by Haeg in Los Angeles, the Sundown Schoolhouse is a non-traditional educational environment for design, literary, performing and visual arts, all housed within a geodesic dome. It was founded on the premise that artists, designers, performers and writers should be powerful and active agents in society, engaging in a rich and complex dialog that extends to the outside world. The Schoolhouse seeks to present an alternate model for educational and artistic practice, one in which public interaction, physical connectedness, and responsiveness to place are valued above all else. Haeg has planned a mobile Schoolhouse specifically for Arthouse, with a curriculum centered on the garden as an inspiring model for balanced relationships among art, natural resources and human need. A large geodesic tent within the galleries serves as the base site for How to Eat Austin, a weekly series of free workshops related to the cycle of food production, from composting and garden design to cooking and marketing the garden harvest. The Schoolhouse is equipped with various instructional and informational materials that visitors can use on site or take home.
Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #5
Edible Estates is an ongoing project to replace domestic front lawns with highly productive edible landscapes responsive to culture, climate, context and people. According to Haeg, Edible Estates is a “practical food producing initiative, place-responsive landscape design proposal, a scientific horticultural experiment, a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political statement, a community out-reach program and an act of radical gardening!” This modest gesture to reconcile issues of global food production and urbanized land use was initiated by Haeg on Independence Day, 2005, with the planting of the first regional prototype garden in a suburban neighborhood in Salina, Kansas (the geographic center of the United States). Since then three additional prototype gardens have been created, in Lakewood, California; Maplewood, New Jersey; and London, England. Commissioned by Arthouse and with the help of community volunteers, Regional Prototype Garden #5 will be planted in Austin from March 14-16, 2008. Ultimately, regional prototype gardens will be established in nine cities across the United States.
About Fritz Haeg Like a system of crop rotation, Fritz Haeg works between his architecture and design practice Fritz Haeg Studio (though his currently preferred clients are animals), the happenings and gatherings of Sundown Salon (now Sundown Schoolhouse), the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab (including Edible Estates), and his role as an educator. He studied architecture in Italy at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his B. Arch. He has variously taught in architecture, design, and fine arts programs at CalArts, Art Center College of Design, Parsons, and the University of Southern California. In 2006 he initiated Sundown Schoolhouse, the alternative educational environment based in his geodesic dome in Los Angeles. He has produced projects and exhibited work at the Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Wattis Institute, San Francisco; the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Maastricht; and the MAK Center, Los Angeles, among other institutions. His new on-going series of projects called Animal Estates will debut at the Whitney Biennial in March 2008 with a commissioned installation in front of the museum. His first book, EdibleEstates: Attack on the Front Lawn, will be published by Metropolis Books and distributed by D.A.P. in February 2008.
Arthouse at the Jones Center
700 Congress Avenue - Austin