Frederieke Taylor gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Ellen Driscoll entitled FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 1, the artist’s first solo show with the gallery. The exhibition will feature sculpture, drawings, and a glass piece by Ellen Driscoll which reflect her continued investigation of the impact of natural-resource harvesting and consumption on our landscape and its architecture.

In her drawings, Ellen Driscoll imagines an apocalyptical future where a refugee camp is pitched atop a water tower and a North Sea oil rig shares the horizon with wildfires and garbage heaps. In her vision of a future world, a McMansion development becomes a slum, while an encampment receives the water of a melting glacier and a power plant spills beyond its boundaries to infiltrate a shopping mall. Using ink on paper, the worlds in the drawings are drained of color, while being filled with the spillage of a chaotic, dystopic future. Using the same language as her drawings, the gallery will present a new painting on architectural glass. Fabricated by Franz Mayer in Munich, Germany, the piece is an architectural iteration of her drawings.

The sculptural landscape, constructed out of translucent, plastic milk and water bottles, presents a similar, chaotic future. These bottles that contained pure milk and water that once quenched our thirst now end up contaminating and destroying our landscape. The piece combines views of the Niger Delta and the Port Harcourt oil refinery in Nigeria with the tar sands of Alberta, Canada and other contaminated sites.

Ellen Driscoll has participated in a large number of exhibitions and has created numerous installations and commissions. Her “Loophole of Retreat” installation which originated at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Phillip Morris in New York in 1991-2 has traveled to various locations in the United States, as has “Ahab’s Wife”, originally shown at the University of Michigan and “Passionate Attitudes” , (1994-5), shown in Hartford, San Francisco and Charlottesville, Virginia. Driscoll is also well known for her public commissions. Among her most recent commissions are an installation, entitled “Wingspun” at the Airport in Raleigh, N.C., “Lumina”, an LED signage project on the outdoor facade at MassArt in Boston (2008) and an installation at the Cambridge Public Library to be completed in 2009. The artist’s work is included in numerous collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Boston Public Library, among many others.

In the Viewing Room:

“Off the Books”, curated by Benjamin Degen Featuring works by Alex Degen, Eric Fertman, Justin Valdes, Anton Vojacek, Yuri Masnyj

April 10 – May 16, 2009 Reception: Thursday, April 16, 6-8PM

“Off the Books” presents artists drawing in text-space. Using the vocabulary of typography, symbols, books, signs, newspapers, runes and digital space, these artists are engaged in an ongoing dialog about the changing nature of text and its place in art-making today. Text is presented as a bridge between the physical world and the metaphysical world; between narrative representational space and non-narrative abstraction.