Naomi Reis: Unnatural Selection
May 17 – June 23, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, May 17, 2013, 7 – 10 PM
Hours: Saturdays and Sundays 12 – 6 PM and by appointment

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Unnatural Selection investigates nature and its representation: How have humans conquered and organized nature, both to understand it scientifically, and to use it strategically?

The exhibition opens on Borrowed Landscape (Tropics of Africa, Asia and the Amazon via Brooklyn), a large-scale vinyl print of a photograph taken at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It captures the spectacle of a simulated rainforest contained within a glass dome; we know that it is an artificial environment, yet we suspend disbelief and for a moment are transported to a distant tropical rainforest, a place very few of us will visit in person. Together with mixed media collages, paintings, live and artificial plants, and botanical drawings that reference 19th-century scientific drawings in specimen trays, Unnatural Selection explores the pressure points where the natural world and the manufactured collide.

Naomi Reis was born in Shiga, Japan, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She was a recent Winter Workspace 2013 resident at Wave Hill in the Bronx, and will have an article in the Spring 2013 issue of Wilder Quarterly about the experience. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the IPCNY, Kunsthalle Galapagos, Blackburn 20|20, Lower East Side Printshop, Field Projects, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Exit Art. She is a graduate of the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania (MFA) and Hamilton College (BA).