Adriane Colburn, Artist, based in San Francisco and New York

adrianecolburn.com

Artist Statement

Over the past several years I have developed a series of installations based on the complex relationship between human infrastructure, earth systems, technology and the natural world. In these projects, large cut paper wall-works are in conversation with manipulated objects, photographs, drawings, video and projected light. 

My installations are extracted from the data, images and video I have collected while participating in scientific expeditions to remote, wild places such as the arctic and amazon. The work reflects on these far-flung environments and the overall state of nature in an age where few stones remain unturned by man. I am particularly interested in romanticized notions of wilderness, the alteration of nature by industry and climate change and the relationships between scientific exploration and exploitation. In participating in these expeditions and generating work from the aftermath, I am reckoning with how our thirst to understand and visualize a landscape can irrevocably disrupt it. 

The large wall-works are made from photographs and drawings that have been transformed through a system of physical removal that results in abstracted images that are informed by voids as much as by positive marks. These fragile and often sprawling constructions are frequently paired with more direct or physically weighty fare in the form of found objects and imagery that points more frankly to the subject matter. At the core of all my work is a fascination with the way that our attempts to make sense of the world around us through maps, data and pictures result in abstractions that are simultaneously informative, formless and utterly ambiguous.