Recent Press

press and publications
Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape, Ed. Denise Markonish, The MIT Press, 2008

see below for some articles, also see some recent links on the events page, full list is in my CV

North Adams Transcript (MA)
May 30, 2008
A piece of land to call your own
John E. Mitchell, North Adams Transcript

NORTH ADAMS -- The old song goes "He's got the whole world in his hands" -- with artist Vaughn Bell's pocket biospheres the lyrical image is an actual possibility. Bell has taken the entire idea of the man-made biosphere -- that is, a closed ecological system -- and brought it into the realm of the art gallery. Rather than making larger structures that humans must get inside, Bell fashions smaller versions, including some that people can take around with them.
"Each one of them is a little handheld terrarium," said Bell. "The ones I'm making for Mass MoCA are going to have little bits of soil and moss and just the native plants that would be there -- but they're tiny, they're only two inches in diameter. They're kind of this miniature world."
Bell gives away the pocket biospheres for adoption -- she has a "pseudo legal" adoption form and a guidebook for people who want to take on the responsibility of overseeing a tiny, self-contained world.
"You have to keep an eye on it, you can't sit it on top of a radiator," said Bell. "You have to pay attention to it. If it looks like it's drying out you can add some moisture to it or move it to a better location."
Tiny biospheres are not Bell's only efforts -- she's also fashioned personal portable biospheres, which are compact domes filled with greenery that people can wear on their heads, and personal home biospheres, which are larger domes that hang from the ceiling, allowing the owner to place his or her head inside in their comfort of their own home.
"I was playing with the idea of what we really yearn for when we're in an urban location and we feel a need -- a physical and emotional necessity -- to be around living things that we often don't have in a really urban place," said Bell. "This is a satire of that with this dome that you could wear over your head and it has this green horizon that was this layer of mosses right in front of your nose. You wouldn't have to smell the exhaust fumes from the cars and everything would be muffled, so it's a really personal piece of nature, but also absurd."
From these, Bell conceptualized her pocket biospheres as well as her ambitious "biospheres built for two."
"The piece that's at Mass MoCA is called 'Village Green' and it takes this idea of these home biospheres and extrapolates it into this New England village," said Bell. "There's this whole collection of biospheric dwellings that are for different numbers of people and some of them evoke this New England town with classic house shapes and others evoke the rolling hills and the dome of the sky, the curve of the original ones, so it's going to be a combination of those two forms."
Bell's work involves a hefty slice of satire, but there is also a huge science fiction component. It's as if everyone wears the spaceship from "Silent Running" on their heads.
"I'm fascinated with all the various and problematic and hopeful ways that we conceive of how we relate to nature," said Bell, "and this futuristic, dystopian vision where we're cut off from nature or we have to build this alternate reality for ourselves, it's one of those visions that especially manifests in this work."
There is also an aspect to Bell's work that is grounded in reality and history -- specifically, the taming of nature in its relationship with the human animal. It was seen as a revolutionary leap in urban life when public parks began to appear in the mid 1800s. The idea was to contain and preserve nature within a city-setting out of the human need to encounter greenery. Bell's biospheres are almost like little emergency versions of a larger public park.
"They're like this intensive care unit kind of feeling where there's this very artificial life that somebody created, a kind of crude approximation of the original ecological system," said Bell. "That is also interesting to me, because you read a lot about restoration efforts and all these things where we're trying to recreate natural systems that we've altered in some ways, and how complex they are, and the difficulty and impossibility of that."
And handing out what are essentially potted plants is not that much different from the efforts of some organizations to hand out tree seedlings for people to plant in their yards -- it's all about creating personal and meaningful relationships between human and plant.
The origins of Bell's work partly lies in her personal history -- landscaping is the family business. Her father, mother and brother all work in the field. Bell thinks it trained her mind to think in the terms it currently does, to have the exact world view that she directs toward her art.
"If you spend a lot of time becoming attuned to how places affect you and how they affect people and how people affect their surroundings early on, to me that's an incredibly rich, ever-expanding realm of exploration," said Bell. "That combined with, to my mind, a feeling of urgency is part of that exploration because we have to figure out a better way of doing things."
Part of Bell's artistic evolution has been the slow realization that what she does is similar to what her family does -- it's the context that is different and in this way she is a trickster of sorts, twisting her family vocation into new horizons, though admittedly smaller ones.
"There's a way in which the creative process sometimes becomes incredibly obvious, but you don't realize it," said Bell. "Suddenly I'm making these domes full of plants or I was making these landscapes on wheels, so doing this and thinking, 'I'm making sculptures, I'm making sculptures,' and then, 'I'm making sculptures about landscapes,' and then just looking at them and saying, 'I'm making landscapes.' It's just that they're human scale, they're directly related to the body in a way that's more obvious than doing a site plan may be."
In turn, Bell's interests might be on a larger scale than the rest of her family's -- she sees her biospheres as miniature manifestations of her fascination with city planning and the realm of psychogeography, which studies how surroundings effect people.
"I like hearing about the way public processes happen, about how people come to decisions about how they want to design their small town or regulate their streetscape or whatever," said Bell. "These are really mundane things, but to me, hearing about them is always fascinating because it always reveals some underlying belief structure or thoughts about what's a good place, how we see ourselves in relation to other species, belief systems that are hard to come out when you look at what kind of design process a town sets up."
Bell sees her work as having an activist component -- she's done performances that involve bringing her "Cultivation Utility Vehicle" -- a cart filled with clumps of dirt that people are invited to adopt.
Bell is also involved with the Water-mark Project in Seattle, a reaction to global warming that creates a visible mark for the changing shoreline of the city, giving a preview to the dimensions of the future urban area after the expected rise of sea level by 20 feet. Her work combines her dual scientific and political interests.
"I'm mostly interested in the ecological and biological sciences and the like," said Bell. "I also really enjoy the parts that are more everyday, like plant identification and horticulture and those kinds of things that are more tactile maybe. I have peers who come from a science background. The other thing that I probably spend more time paying attention to is reading about environmental policy and all the ways that our culture uses that information."
Bell's work is deceptively simplistic -- one plastic globe with dirt and moss contains the culmination of her personal history and intellectual interests, as well as her desire for action and dialogue. In this way, they are small works that point to larger vistas -- and by offering them up for adoption, Bell is giving a little piece of herself to each gallery visitor. Not only is this an intimate transaction for an art performance, one adds personal value to the little bit of nature by attaching to it an exact memory of how it came into the person's life, it is also an action that widens the vistas that Bell's work hints at.
"I have this ongoing fascination with things being a microcosm that, both visually and conceptually, is itself and can stand in for something larger," said Bell. "Moss is this miniature thing in this Japanese garden kind of way, this bonsai kind of way, in which the human made and controlled landscape of the garden becomes representative of all those larger things -- the large landscape, the sacred landscape."
Vaughn Bell's biospheres are on display as part of Mass MoCA's "Badlands" show. She can be found online at www.vaughn bell.net.
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(c) 2008 North Adams Transcript. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Media NewsGroup, Inc. by NewsBank, Inc.

The Berkshire Eagle
May 28, 2008
The art of cultivation
French Clements, Special to The Eagle
Thursday, May 29 As Mass MoCA approaches its tenth year as America's largest contemporary art center, another venerable Berkshire institution marks a different milestone this seasonóits first contemporary art exhibition. "Cultivate" opens June 8 at the Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge, as a companion exhibit to "Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape," which recently opened at North Adams' Mass MoCA. Denise Markonish, the Mass MoCA curator who conceived and organized both shows, said, "Badlands is about the darker side of our relation to the landscape, so I wanted to do a show for the Garden that was about nurturing." Markonish arranged the exhibitions so that many of the artists appearing in "Badlands" share an inverse mentality in their work for "Cultivate."
Growth, as opposed to destruction, is the key feature of many of Cultivate's 12 newly commissioned pieces, which range across the Garden's 15 acres. In "Vainglorious," for instance, artist Lynn Koble used special mirrors to reflect and frame the summer-long progress of a new seedbed. For "Monumental Compost Heap," Christopher K. Ho mixed hay, soil, and other organic materials inside a large statue base made not of marble, but of salvaged wooden pallets. The compost will be used to nourish the surrounding splendor.
John Parker, the Garden's executive director, pointed out last week that art and gardening share deep connections. "Horticulture, done well, combines art and science. Both contribute to a larger whole, so that any functionally organized garden is appealing as well as practical. The goal is to create a landscape that inspires, in its texture, color, and shape."
When art speaks the universal language of growth, inspiration is plainly visible. One example is "Tree of Heaven," a work by Brooklyn, N.Y. artists Luke Stettner and Mac Carbonell, who visited Stockbridge a few weeks ago. In a narrow bed of mulch parallel to Route 102, they planted several Ailanthus altissimaóthe so-called Tree of Heaven. City planners revile this hardy species, invasive to North America, because it shoots up through the sidewalks and asphalt of untended areas. (Its other monikers include the "ghetto palm" and the "stink tree.") The artists waited a few weeks for the trees' roots to take hold, and returned last weekend to shear off their tops. They then poured concrete to the thickness of a sidewalk, out of which, like it or not, these trees are guaranteed to spring forth.
Although Garden officials said that they expect to get some flack for Tree of Heaven, it might draw favorable comparisons to Mass MoCA's signature piece, Natalie Jeremijenko's Tree Logic, known countywide as "the upside-down trees." These maple saplings were planted above the museum's main entry in 1999. They are now thriving, in their planters and in the memory of countless visitors fascinated by nature's tendency to find a way forward, or up.
Markonish arrived at Mass MoCA last August from New Haven, Conn., where she was gallery director and curator for the avant-garde ArtSpace. "Badlands" (her first show for the museum) and "Cultivate" reflect her longstanding personal interest in artists who deal in natural history and the animal kingdom. She stressed the timeliness of their message. "We're at a critical point in the worldówe're becoming more aware of ecological peril. Now is the time to address the landscape as part of our concern."
The artists in both exhibitions, Markonish said, represent the "next chapter in landscape art. They're playing off of our environmental history, but with a new twist." That history, as Markonish's vision addresses it, includes the idealized depictions of nature by a range of artists with American roots in the mid-1800s, with the Hudson River School of painters.
The conceptual genre known as Earth Art, popular in the 1960s and 1970s, also finds a response in both exhibitions. Whereas Earth artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer found intellectual domination in moving mountainsósometimes literallyóMarkonish said that today's environmental artists are inclined to employ irony, practicality, and sensitivity. "These artists have responded with amazement and reverence for our landscape, but there's also fear and a deep desire for change."
Markonish cited Connecticut artist Leila Daw, whose work, as it appears in "Badlands" and "Cultivate," addresses how natural forces shape history. In North Adams, her paintings depict volcanoes and floods that decimate civilization as a lesson in awareness. In Stockbridge, her installation "Ancient Present" is calmer but no less foreboding. Rocky rubble, hanging by chains from an old oak tree, invites thoughts of an environment without us, whether primal or post-apocalyptic.
Daw, as a professor at Boston's Massachusetts College of Art, taught Vaughn Bell, a Seattle-based artist whose work appears in both exhibitions. Bell came to Berkshire Botanical Garden last weekend with her father, a recently retired landscape architect, to install her piece. With it, she continues a theme of displacement in her 2006 work Surrogate Mountain. Viewers of this scale ceramic model of Washington's iconic Mount Rainier were invited to wheel it all over Seattle, using a leash.
For Cultivate, Bell sculpted a whole colony of mushroom-like mountains and devised the title "Surrogate Mountain's Berkshire Vacation." Her tiny village lies at the foot of a half-dozen quaking aspens. It's her version of a distant landscape, for locals to contemplate.
Bell said she was fascinated by miniaturization, especially as found in Japanese culture, which, she said, brings mastery to forms not often addressed by artists elsewhere. In a similar way, she said, "Museums are starting to extend beyond the traditional boundaries. They're no longer just fortresses of art."(c) 2008 The Berkshire Eagle. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Media NewsGroup, Inc. by NewsBank, Inc.

The Stranger
May 4-10, 2006
In Art News: Mountain
BY Jen Graves
It was a sunny day, so we took Mount Rainier for a walk. We led it up the sidewalk on its leash, waited for the light to change, and crossed East Olive Way. As we passed Supercuts, a man waiting for a stylist peered out the window and gave Mount Rainier the thumbs-up. We came upon two miniature dachshunds, and I thought they might take this rumbling thing for a fellow animal—it looked like a snow-capped pet turtle on wheels—but they played in the grass and only glanced up at us.
Surrogate Mount Rainier is the name of this cooped-up papier-mâché charity case, which spends its days and nights at Crawl Space Gallery waiting to be walked. It is in a group show of public artworks. Few phrases in art sound grimmer than "a group show of public artworks," but this exhibition is diverse, funny, and intimate, unlike the blank, monolithic art we've come to expect from works that receive government funding.
In the same spirit as Vaughn Bell's miniature pet peak is Diana Falchuk's video tribute to U.S. mailboxes, in which the artist, in the dress and demeanor of a neurotic war bride from another era, coddles the mailboxes in her neighborhood. It's called Mailboxes Are People, Too.
Against one wall of the gallery is a side table where framed pictures sit upon a doily. In the pictures are the three artists John Sutton, Ben Beres, and Zac Culler, dressed up as two elderly men and a woman (Earl, Gerald, and Wendy), riding roller coasters and merry-go-rounds and marching with Bush-Cheney 2004 placards. Their story, which presumably they share with curious onlookers, is that Wendy is dating Gerald, but she used to be married to the clingy Earl.
Across the street from the gallery at Pretty Parlor, Mount Rainier's earth tones were clashing with the racks of fruity-colored summer clothes. My friend picked up the big-bellied mountain and squeezed it into the store's photo booth. When the flash went off, she pushed up the end of her nose so she resembled a pig hugging a volcano to its chest. We were having a good time, but not everyone loved the little landmass. On its way out, one of the mountain's craggy edges got stuck on the foot of another shopper. "I'm sorry," I said. "It's quite all right," she replied archly.
As we rolled home to Crawl Space, passersby eyed us but didn't say anything. To those whose stares lingered, I said informatively, "Mount Rainier." Near our final turnoff, a thin, dark-haired young man with a cane looked at Mount Rainier, blurted "Oh—the mountain!" and then shot us a glance as if we were dragging around a starving hippopotamus.
We looped the leash back on its hook at the gallery. The artist watching over the show told us, "Nobody ever takes it outside."

The Seattle Weekly April 26, 2006
"Personally Public"
By Sue Peters

"Please feel free to take the mountain for a test walk" invites the sign that accompanies Vaughan Bell's mini papier-maché Mount Rainier on wheels and leash. Slightly less eccentric than poet Gerard de Nerval's pet lobster on a ribbon, Bell's Surrogate Mount Rainier illustrates "our need to possess and control and care for our environment." Arguably, Bell is referring to two different kinds of people—say, industrialists and environmentalists—but she addresses this duality of intent in an accessible, playful way, maintaining the tension between the two opposing impulses. And wheeling the mountain around is just plain fun. Indeed, the connecting thread of "Personally Public," the group show of Fluxus-style concepts by 11 local artists and artistic teams, is the absurdist's glee in creating incongruities for public reaction. Ashley Thorner's Rapid Air Color Pods are odd bundles of plastic pouches gathered in knitted fluorescent sacs that can be inflated and deflated with straws. Thorner placed them at various popular locations in town and encouraged people to play with them. Show curator Diana Falchuk dons her grandmother's 1940s sensible coat, with blazing red pumps and matching lipstick, and sets about lovingly wrapping squat blue mailboxes with colorful legwarmers fashioned from sleeves of women's sweaters in her video, Mailboxes Are People Too. Obviously they aren't, but Falchuk is inviting us to reconsider the ubiquitous receptacles that we entrust with our bills, packages, and love letters. In Public Surveys, Sarah Kavage and Nicole Kistler demonstrate the subjectivity and snobbery that influences art appreciation by taking a photo of a framed seascape on a museum wall and Photoshopping the same image onto a frameless picture in a garage sale setting. Then they asked respondents to evaluate the worth and skill involved in each painting. Not surprisingly, people gave more value to the one in the gilded frame.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Friday, April 28, 2006
Sneaky public art coming your way at Crawlspace
By Regina Hackett, P-I Art Critic

Because public art passes through committees, each exacting drafts and redrafts, the end product can be as subservient as a butler.
 
ART REVIEW
 
GALLERY ROUNDUP
"Personally Public" at Crawl Space
Enrique Martinez Celaya at Greg Kucera Gallery
Laura Letinsky at James Harris Gallery
That subservience is a long way from the antic creativity of artists who made history by turning public spaces into open-air, performance art studios. Problem was, nobody got paid.
More than 30 years after this public art boom, artists are emerging around the country who are willing, at least initially, to forgo payment in order to create a product that's fully their own. Without anyone's permission, they're taking their art to the streets.
Crawl Space surveys a range of this off-the-public-art-books art in an exhibit titled "Personally Public."
Not all these artists survive on their good looks. The art team known as SuttonBeresCuller gratefully accepts grants but continues to work, funded or not.
At Crawl Space, there's a dainty table filled with family photos. Each features the trio impersonating their great-grandparents, an ongoing performance titled "The Golden Years." The subject is physical bonds and mental barriers. The audience doesn't need seats, because it's on stage with the actors, influencing the outcome of the play.
Ron Lambert and Vaughn Bell provide art experiences to anyone open-minded enough to accept them. Lambert fashioned an umbrella built for two. That means space for him and you. He documents the reactions he inspires, from averse to adventurous. Bell created a replica of Mount Rainier and takes it for a walk on a leash, offering those whose view is blocked by buildings a pathetic personal encounter with what's left of nature.
Diana Falchuk curated "Personally Public" and contributed photos and video documenting her ongoing appreciation of letter boxes titled "Mailboxes Are People Too." Sentimentality pushed to loony extreme becomes pointed satire. The animal-rights movement will not be amused.
Peter Gaucys ties thick red ropes into knots. His sculpture ("Cherry Red") is the kind of thing that you might see as rubbish on fishing docks, except, it's rubbish with animal magnetism. I long to sink my fingers into those clots.
In the next couple of weeks, it's a good idea to scan the facade of public buildings for Peter Bonnell's tiny human heads. He mounted them all around town: monuments to nothing and everything, hard to spot as they blend into their backgrounds but once seen, entertaining in their anonymous yet stuffy pomposity.
Ashley Thorner appears to be making fun of abstract plop art. Her imitation looks plausibly authentic until it sinks into a bright puddle. Actually, she's offering a plop art alternative. Her plastic and vinyl "Rapid Air Pods" can be assembled by passers-by, like Tinker Toys, into pseudo-serious art forms. Who's the artist here? Everybody.
Kristen Ramirez's map of Seattle is made of private longing expressed through postcards. Robert Zervina buys cereal, turns the package inside out and returns it to the store. His blank boxes are a critique of our brand-name life.
"Personally Public" invites us to look around. Thanks to these artists, even the most ordinary Seattle street might sport radical adornment or offer a unique encounter.