Phoebe Washburn:
Regulated Fools Milk Meadow
Deutsche Guggenheim
Unter den Linden 13/15
10117 Berlin
p +49-30-202093-0
f +49-30-202093-20
berlin.guggenheim [at] db.com
Open Daily 11am-8pm; Thursdays 11am-10pm
Phoebe Washburn’s installations explore generative systems based on absurd patterns of production. She typically combines countless numbers of cardboard boxes or pieces of scrap wood that she skims off the refuse of consumers and commerce, combing dumpsters and loading docks for basic matter. Her materials are discarded relics of daily routines, fatefully and incidentally discovered and transported to the studio where they are ordered and repurposed, imbuing with value what was once deemed worthless. Featuring already used, already worn, already consumed objects, which carry evidence of their own histories, she stacks, binds, and nails together her discoveries into installations that often tell the story of their own making, consolidating by-products of their creation, such as sawdust and packing materials, into the final project.
For Deutsche Guggenheim, Washburn has conceived of Regulated Fool’s Milk Meadow as a self-contained “factory” that incorporates its own product–grass for the projects sod roof–into the installation over the course of the exhibition. For the first time, the artist integrates mechanics into her work, using a conveyor belt loop to shuttle small plots of soil through different stations for light and water, which nourishes the growth of grass. These “plots” are periodically tended by a “gardener” who plants the seed, allows it to germinate in a greenhouse before shifting the organic matter to the factory where it will mature, and finally places the output on the roof of the structure where it will eventually atrophy and wither, removed from the sustaining system of water and light, thus exhibiting the full cycle of growth and decay.
Washburn largely relies on improvisational and amateurish construction techniques. The spontaneity of her architecture resonates with the natural development of the growing sod roof as well as its organic decline and decay. This practice stands in contrast with the characteristic efficiency intrinsic to the factory system. But Washburn often mines such apparently ridiculous juxtapositions–here, organic growth and mechanical tools–as loci of creativity.
Curator:
Joan Young, Associate Curator for Contemporary Art and Manger of Curatorial Affairs, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Catalogue in German and English with essays by Jan Avgikos and Ben Hamper as well as an interview between the artist and the curator.
For press information please contact Sara Bernshausen, phone: +49-30-202093-14; e-mail: sara.bernshausen@db.com
