Initially, Invasive Species, a new exhibit by Ed Andrews, was supposed to solely be a commentary about the state of the environment. After all, Andrews, a Kansas native, has been fighting invasive species all his life whether it’s the loss of 12 American elm trees in his childhood home or the European Gypsy moth making quick work of the trees around Andrews’ northern Rhode Island studio.

The installation for Invasive Species at Boston Sculptors Gallery includes a large tree canopy and eight “spiders” that live in it. After a while, Andrews says, it became clear that the spiders looked like little drones so he decided to add cameras to the unit to make them even more invasive. The result is an exhibit that is not just a commentary about contemporary environmental issues but also about government surveillance.

Surveillance has bubbled up as a theme in Andrews’ earlier work as well. In See/Through at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center For the Arts, the gallery space accommodated several real-time viewing stations fitted with surveillance cameras that could be trained on neighboring spaces. “As a citizen artist, I am inherently sensitive to changes that potentially threaten the rights and personal freedoms of the individual over and against any kind of authority,” says Andrews, a professor of sculpture and 3-D fundamentals at Northeastern University in Boston.

Invasive Species installation. Photo by Eric Antoniou

Much of Andrews’ activism on behalf of the environment comes from being steeped in it. His studio in Glocester, Rhode Island, is surrounded by deep woods, which he recently got rezoned as a forest. To achieve that he had to work with a state forester to learn about the woods and how to best manage what he had. “That includes managing invasive species of plants and insects and much of my knowledge of invasive species are a direct result of my forestry management training,” Andrews says.

Andrews started out as a landscape painter and switched to sculpture after seeing friends pursuing it. Growing up in a shop environment with his dad who taught him about tools also helped. Now he describes himself as a landscape sculptor bringing elements such as wind, water, light, sound and movement into his work.

Invasive Species detail during installation. Photo courtesy of Ed Andrews.

What does Andrews want viewers to take away from Invasive Species? “I want them to be both seduced in the space and a bit unnerved as the activity in the canopy increases in rhythm and the sounds become more intense,” he says. “But I also hope to create a memorable experience of a magical kind of environment that they enter fully, that surrounds them with sound and movement and recreates a little of the awe that we all feel when we enter into the woods.”

Ed Andrews–sculptor
Gloucester, Rhode Island
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Top image: Detail from Invasive Species. Photo courtesy of Ed Andrews.

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David Katz has had a couple of chairs in his possession for as long as he can remember. They’re family heirlooms, but after 20 years of constant shuffling between his various residences, they had become worn to the point of disrepair. Still, Katz was not ready to part with them. So he decided he would use them as centerpieces of his art, creating installations that use the chairs and unfired clay to make a statement about the fragility of life.

Katz, a faculty member in the ceramics department at the Rhode Island School of Design, has a new exhibit called Flextime showing at 3S Artspace in New Hampshire and it borrows similar themes. Chairs, Katz says, are particularly unique objects in that their physical form implies the body but shown by themselves they also amplify the absence of the human form. By using old chairs—many of which have been rescued from salvage bins—and clay in its purest form in breathtaking installations, Katz presents the exhibit as a marker of time and change.

Unfired clay is an especially good medium to work with as it starts out wet and slowly cracks over time, Katz says. “I think of it as this living stuff and you can get an immediate, tactile reaction in a very visceral way,” he says. “You give the installation life and then you watch it go through this transition where it starts to get covered with cracks. Every crack is a marker of the passage of time, and that’s built into the art.” The fact that the installations are temporary—from a period of days to months—adds to that temporal feeling.

Liminality of Innocence and Loss. Photo by David Katz.

Katz maintains a studio practice in Providence while teaching full-time. As an instructor he believes it’s important to communicate honestly about the work you’re invested in. “I’m really focused on trying to open up pathways for students to find a voice that’s honest and uniquely them,” he says.

Katz shares his love of the medium of clay with his students reminding them about the incredibly rich history behind the material. “I want them to understand the context of its cultural narrative along with art history and contemporary use, to really know the rules, so they can then break them.”

Interstitial Tension. Photo by Nick Lemoyne

Katz applies the same principles to his own art as he explores the juxtapositions in life through found objects and ceramic principles. When he bounds found objects like chairs with clay, he’s swallowing them up and the chairs are simultaneously breaking free, he says. “It appears that this object has agency in that it is being wrapped and consumed but then it’s also cracking and falling apart.”

Every Which Way (scaled). Photo courtesy of David Katz.

In one sense, Flextime might well be a statement about the histories of families, Katz says. After all, they are bound together by blood ties even as each individual tries to carve his or her own unique identity. “I love these in-between places where there’s that constant push and pull, that constant tension.”

David Katz–sculptor
Providence, Rhode Island
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Top image: Flextime installation. Photo by Nick Lemoyne

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