Two years ago artist and Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui organized “Come Together: Surviving Sandy,” a nearly 100,000-square-foot pop-up exhibition in an Industry City building. The show testified to enduring creativity and community in New York one year after the Superstorm devastated the region. The latest exhibition under the banner of Brooklyn Rail Curatorial Projects, “Social Ecologies,” occupies a ground-floor space on the same block where “Come Together” was held, and takes environmental crisis as a similar point of departure. Curated by artist, writer and Rail Art Books section editor Greg Lindquist, the pointed 21-artist show spans approaches to the subject of the changing landscape and its relationship to aesthetic practice. Lindquist, a painter himself, includes several examples of the medium, from Rackstraw Downes’s oils of Texas to Josephine Halvorson’s zoomed-in depictions of natural surfaces. These works hang alongside sculptures by Allyson Vieira and David Brooks, first-generation Land Art by the likes of Robert Smithson and Mary Miss, and conceptual “mappings” by artists such as Martha Rosler and Matthew C. Wilson.
Pictured: View of “Social Ecologies,” 2015, at Rail Curatorial Projects. Courtesy Rail Curatorial Projects.