Nowhere to Hide: Three Artists in the Desert

Julie Anand, Richard Lerman, Carrie Marill
October 10, 2009-February 20, 2010

“Nowhere to Hide”  presents the work of three artists who live in Phoenix and have explored definitions of sustainability in their multi-media artworks. Their approaches range from photography to sound sculpture and gouache paintings.

Julie Anand’s Material Histories are based on her walks around the Valley; as she moves through the city’s neighborhoods she collects lost and discarded items along the way. Her brilliantly-hued photographs present the found objects like specimens and begin to tell stories of the people who have traveled along the same path – their habits and preoccupations.

Richard Lerman is a well-known sound artist who creates speakers and instruments from tumbleweeds and cactus, cereal boxes and rejection letters. His work often explores the inevitable trade-offs in our interaction with the land, how even green systems and solutions impact our environment.

Visual Aides, by Carrie Marill, is a series of gouache paintings which represent environmental problems and solutions brought on and devised by humans. The series was inspired by candy-colored classroom posters from the 1940s, found by the artist at a flea market in France, of different domestic, agricultural, industrial and maritime landscapes. She reprints the images on watercolor paper and updates them with current events and objects, like recycling bins in a bucolic farmyard and a cargo ship with a parasail in the busy harbor scene.

Marill, like all of the artists in the exhibition, grapples with issues of personal responsibility and control, sustainable systems that inevitably require compromise and the complex, global challenges of humans living on earth.

Inquires