AGUSTINA WOODGATE: FACING EARTH
/AGUSTINA WOODGATE: FACING EARTH
Gillespie Gallery
February 3 - March 28, 2020
About the Exhibition
Mason Exhibitions is honored to introduce the art of Agustina Woodgate to the Greater Washington area following her inclusion in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
With the advent of digital mapping technologies, the use of globes and paper maps will likely continue to diminish, at least as reference tools. As geological and political territories erode, Earth becomes a more volatile entity.
This exhibition features a collection of Agustina Woodgate’s recent artworks in which the artist uses techniques of erasure using sandpaper to alter the surfaces of analog cartographic instruments and didactics such as maps, globes, and atlases. This elemental process of sanding reveals a complex poetics in the resulting objects, destroying their functional properties, while evoking their essential poetic and sculptural significance.
Sanding erases demarcations of power, eroding intended and arbitrary features. As the artist meticulously destroys the surface of these maps--the historic and economic data, names of territories, and other references to land and water--she also painstakingly collects the resulting paper and ink dust particles. To create the series entitled Cosmética, these extractions have been sorted by color, caked into tins, and embedded in granite and marble slabs resembling both scaled-up cosmetic trays and tombstones. The cosmological palates act as epitaphs for the conventional, politicized and territorialized understanding of our planet and also literally provide the make up for a new earth.
FACING EARTH PARTICIPATORY PROJECT
Students, faculty, and gallery visitors are invited to contribute to Facing Earth’s online exhibition catalogue to be published following the exhibition by Provisions Research Center for Art & Social Change.
To participate, compose a brief response to Facing Earth in any form: words, quotations, drawings, photographs, micro-videos, research evidence, diagrams, data graphics, etc. Contributions might include clips from studies and news of climate change, species extinction, nation-state and territorial disputes, mapping technologies and ecologies, with near or long-term horizons and consequences.
Participation is open to all, and may include students and practitioners from fields such as Climate Science, Geographic Information Systems, Philosophy, Educational Psychology, Creative Writing, and History, and other research-based disciplines.
Submit your content in digital form to drusse10@ gmu.edu. You may also upload your submission to your Instagram or Twitter accounts with following hashtags: #ProvLib and #MasonFacingEarth.
To schedule gallery tours and discussions with Mason Exhibitions staff, contact: drusse10@ gmu.edu.
About the Artist
Agustina Woodgate (b. 1981, Buenos Aires, Argentina, lives in Miami, FL and Amsterdam, the Netherlands) Agustina Woodgate has exhibited internationally and has received numerous honors and awards. Her projects have been included the 2019 Whitney Biennial; the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; 9th Berlin Biennial; Peabody Essex Museum, MA; Bienal de las Américas, CO; ArtPort, Tel Aviv; PlayPublik, Poland; 5x5, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Washington; The Bass Museum of Art, FL; Storefront for Art and Architecture, MN and KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin amongst others. She received her BFA in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Artes in Buenos Aires and completed a Masters in Design at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. The artist is represented by Spinello Projects, Miami, FL.