To the Thawing Wind, Berlin

To The Thawing Wind
Freies Museum, Berlin, March 13 - April 9, 2010
Awst & Walther, David Buckland, Louisa Conrad & Lucas Farrell.

To The Thawing Wind
Come with rain. O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate'er you do tonight,
bath my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit's crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o'er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

Robert Frost, A Boy's Will, 1913

To The Thawing Wind will present works by the artist duos Manon Awst & Benjamin Walther and Louisa Conrad & Lucas Farrell, as well as a video by David Buckland created during one of his “Cape Farewell” expeditions to the Arctic.

Whether working with ice as a raw material or creating art while in the sweeping glaciers of the northern hemisphere, the artists exhibited all share a romantic fascination with the poetry inherent to our most precious natural resource in its most transitory state. While David Buckland’s work, The End of Ice, resonates with environmental concerns by capturing the beauty at stake in a rapidly warming climate, Awst & Walther turn their focus to the metaphoric potential of natural decomposing materials, such as gelatin, as a physical manifestation of the ephemeral.

Lucas Farrell, a poet, and Louisa Conrad, a visual artist with a degree in anthropology, combine these focuses in their collaborative process and will exhibit works created during their recent three month residency in remote Iceland (incidentally where Farrell proposed and Conrad accepted). "To The Thawing Wind" will juxtapose these artists and their works as a visual testament to the romance that dwells in nature’s frozen recesses, while hopefully contributing to ongoing global efforts to raise awareness of our planet’s most threatened environments.

To The Thawing Wind, curated by Emilie Trice, is part of a collaborative exhibition, entitled Satellites, along with two other shows, Satellites in the Night, curated by Hannes Bend and Room without a View, curated by Trong Nguyen.

About the artists:
Manon Awst (UK) and Benjamin Walther (DE) began their collaboration in 2006. They recently created WORK IN PROGRESS, a public installation in the form of a wall made of ice blocks at the German Embassy in London to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Pooling their expertise in theatre and architecture, Awst and Walther’s work explores their shared interests in social, spatial and experiential concerns, creating performances, installations, sculptures and drawings that critically address fundamental themes of human existence. They are represented by Hannah Barry Gallery, London and live and work in North Wales and Berlin.

David Buckland (UK) initiated his Cape Farewell project in 2001 with the aim of propelling climate change into global cultural discourse. To date, the project has led seven expeditions to the Arctic, bringing along artists, musicians, scientists, writers and film directors in order to expand awareness of this inspirational environment. Past participants include Sophie Calle, Rachel Whiteread, Gary Hume and Nicole Krauss, author of "The History of Love." Buckland recently co- curated "Earth: Art of a Changing World" at The Royal Academy of Arts in London and his work is in the collections of The National Portrait Gallery, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum, New York and The Getty Collection, Los Angeles, among others.

Louisa Conrad and Lucas Farrell (both USA) also began their collaboration in 2006. Since then, their work has focused on northern climates and has taken them to Inuvik, Northwest Territories (the oil and gas mecca of the Canadian Arctic), as well as Iceland, where they recently spent three months compiling "A People’s Guide to Icelandic Butterflies." Conrad received her MFA from CalArts and was recently included in the group show "The End of Oil" at ExitArt in New York City. Farrell earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana. His writing has appeared in the Boston Review, Jubilat, Mid-AmericanReview, and Outside Magazine, and his chapbook, "The Blue-Collar Sun," is just out from Alice Blue Books. He edits the international poetry journal Slope.