Wednesday, December 6th, 2023
6:30 – 8:00 pm
Location: 1 Commandant’s Lane, Benicia
Free event open to the public, Registration is required due to limited space.
Part of Arts Benicia’s Art Talks … and Timely Conversations Series:
Event Description: Can art offer unique ways to approach the vast uncertainties of the climate crisis? Can art help connect us to an ambiguous future by injecting imagination, emotion, and curiosity? Visual artists Hughen/Starkweather and Lordy Rodriguez discuss the role of water as a concept, concern, and inspiration in their research-based art practices.
ABOUT THE EVENT SPEAKERS
Lordy Rodriguez is on the board of Arts Benicia. His works explore the human urge to locate/define oneself by charting the environment in precise detail. Using the language of cartography, he makes drawings that go beyond map-making into abstracted, imaginary terrain. One of his earliest bodies of work, the America series, involved redrawing the boundaries and locations of the 50 United States and the cities within them. Subsequent works, including the Abstracted and Geological series, pushed the iconography of mapmaking further into abstraction, omitting the text that is so crucial to cartography. Lordy’s newest works on paper utilize the map as a framework in which to experiment with unorthodox combinations of familiar visual languages from a variety of sources, including advertising, reality TV, fashion, gift-wrapping, and signature images associated with celebrity artists. lordyrodriguez.com
Hughen/Starkweather is the collaboration of artists Jennifer Starkweather and Amanda Hughen, who have worked as a team for almost 20 years. Together they create research-based, abstract artworks about specific topics or locations. For the past several years Hughen/Starkweather have researched the impacts of climate disruption on places where water meets land, exploring engineered, human-made structures that are increasingly, inextricably interwoven with natural systems in the landscape, and how these systems might fail or succeed together. hughensta
Artwork by Hughen/Starkweather