IN THE WEEDS

Curated by Georgia Diva McGovern

Izzy Barber, Annika Berry, Madeleine Bialke, Simone Kearney, Jennie Jieun Lee, Lee Maxey, Irina Jasnowski Pascual, Kate Ruggeri, Linda Carmella Sibio, Elena Yu

November 14 - December 26, 2020

The most anesthetizing color possible...similar to a fat cow, full of health, lying down, rooted, capable only of ruminating and contemplating the world through its stupid, inexpressive eyes. - Wassily Kandinsky

Green, the color of leaves, grass, algae, is deeply rooted in the outdoors. In the last few decades, the disparity between the green mother nature and the digital world has become starker. As the natural world itself simplifies and loses mass, this adaptable color naturally subverted itself and slowly crept in interior spaces, and minds. An old mantra of art institutions was “too much spinach; you can’t sell a green painting.” Today, green is the flagship color of the environmental movement, nature-starved millennials are filling their apartments with plants to buffer from looming disaster rhetoric, and this under-represented color has acquired anti-capitalist pro-revolution credentials. What’s selling doesn’t matter as much as what is being said, and this color has a lot to say. 

In the Weeds probes the complicated nature of this color to highlight the multifaceted meaning of green in the technological era and Anthropocene. In the Weeds is composed of work by 10 women-identifying artists. Each artist confronts green uniquely, embracing the term’s relation to vegetation, nature, growth, and on the other side of the coin, greed, jealousy, the lurid screens of the ’80s/90’s. Green can represent many things, as a color, it is as morally ambiguous as it is ubiquitous.