Pat Berran, Amie Cunningham, Candice Hoeflinger, and Kate Horne are the core artists who constitute the artist-run collective known as The Orchestra, a group working within the United States and Canada. In their first show at RARE titled The Orchestra Presents The Orchestra, the collective explores the creation of modern-day relics with a sensitivity to history, craft, and humans’ precarious relationship with nature.

The paintings and works on paper by Pat Berran offer an abstract world that operates in both a seductive and destructive manner. Hidden within lines, shapes, and colors of his rough, untamed landscapes are quiet glimmers of beauty. Heavily influenced by punk rock, Berran’s paintings imagine what we will be left with when the party – our current culture of excess and exploitation – is over.

Amie Cunningham reclaims material from old tree trunks, scrap-wood, and busted up furniture found at the town dump in creating objects that search for modern spiritual significance. For example, Persian Rug Burnt by a Fire with Resting Birds (2006), constructed from charred and weathered carvings of found wood bound together into intricate patterns, hangs from a wall like a skeleton of some long-dead tradition.

Candice Hoeflinger meshes still photography, sound, and video into animated collages. Gathering imagery from popular sources, she transforms identifiable material from magazines into stories that take place atop enigmatic landscapes. Hoeflinger offers what she calls a ‘visual batter’ of introspection and fantasy of our shared cultural experience.

Imagining a world where animals and humans exist on the same social plane, Kate Horne uses discarded materials to make animal figures that express human traits. She bestows on them an aura of authority and power, as well as the very human traits of humor and awkwardness. This relationship is easily observed between The Girl (2007), seemingly aloof with her hair blowing behind her, and Wolf Man (2007), who holds a mirror and trails behind her