M Gallery, CICA Museum
December 14 – 18, 2022
2022.12.14 – 18
Broken Pattern
This exhibition presents a collection of recent drawings and an animation that explore human impact on the world, by merging anatomies and landscapes into single forms. The works provide new and fantastic visualizations of eco-anxiety and speculate on possibilities beyond planetary collapse. They depict rampant cycles of human consumption and the resulting detriment to diverse species and the surrounding world. The mechanics of consumerism is a driving theme behind this work, with a specific focus on the factory food system and its implications for land depletion and climate shift. These patterns are played out on the surfaces of sculptures that express the physical and psychological fallout.
In the work, sculpted and drawn anatomies become stages for human cycles of consumption and land degradation; literal embodiments of various compromised environments. Miniature vehicles and animals are forced along pathways in these works that often lead to dead ends, underlining the precarious nature and bleak future inherent to these practices.
The careful crafting and drawing of these works and their miniature details counter the exhibition’s themes of fast food, hyperactive production, and on demand delivery. The work’s creation represents hours of reflection on the meaning of being an active consumer in this world and struggling to imagine models beyond it. The self-deprecating nature of the work softens dystopic paranoia with humor and invention, attempting to provide new access points to thinking outside of ourselves and our global predicament.
Jude Griebel is a Canadian sculptor of settler ancestry, working between Alberta, Canada and Brooklyn, New York. He creates intensively detailed drawings and sculptures that visualize our entanglement with the surrounding world. In his works, landscapes, the species we affect, and the waste we create, coalesce in vivid forms that illustrate the reach of our impact and consumption habits. Both harbingers of ruin and agents of transformation, his works build on art historical traditions of the anthropomorphic body to reflect a planet in a state of crisis.
Griebel has completed numerous residencies including Pioneer Works, New York; International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams and HALLE 14 Center for Contemporary Art, Leipzig. Recent exhibitions include the Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada; ISCP, New York; Galerie Sturm, Nuremberg; and the Spinnerei Archiv Massiv, Leipzig. Griebel’s work has been supported by major grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts and he is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. His work has been collected internationally by institutions that include the Arsenal Contemporary Art, Montreal, the Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee and the Volpert Foundation, New York.
