Selected Project Images
The Fossil Flora of Mazon Creek
Environmental Installation
Chicago Academy of Sciences/ Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum - 2018-19
For over three decades, Andrew Young has created art that presents nature as a reference point for human aspirations, worldly and spiritual. His earlier tempera works grappled with our natural desire for ethereal and transcendent experience, yet constrained by such temporal matters as history and mortality. The next phase in Young’s work more clearly reflected his background in science. Carefully constructed collages explored how we observe and catalog our surroundings, defining us through the models and language we use. A new direction here goes further into the physical aspect of art making; specific sources of pigments, their collection and processing, carry as much meaning as any imagery found or invented. The material itself grounds us to a living or geological occurrence, and to a place.
Today, we are at an inflection point in our relationship to the landscape. No matter if one’s perception of nature is romantic, aesthetic, or purely utilitarian, dramatic change is underway. All This Land is a paradoxical title for a show that uses a little humor, theater, abstraction, and a ton of recovered objects to address a more somber awareness that Earth’s fragile systems and resources, despite some current beliefs and tendencies, are not inexhaustible.
Today, we are at an inflection point in our relationship to the landscape. No matter if one’s perception of nature is romantic, aesthetic, or purely utilitarian, dramatic change is underway. All This Land is a paradoxical title for a show that uses a little humor, theater, abstraction, and a ton of recovered objects to address a more somber awareness that Earth’s fragile systems and resources, despite some current beliefs and tendencies, are not inexhaustible.
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