Casey Logan at Little Tree Gallery

Artist: Casey Logan
Gallery: Little Tree Gallery
Exhibit Dates: March 29, 2008 - April 26, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday April 5, 2008 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

"come celebrate the knowledge
you never knew you had"




Casey Logan, who has exhibited at Ping Pong Gallery, Johansson Projects, and Root Division among others in the bay area and internationally, is exhibiting this month at Little Tree Gallery in the Mission.

His work reminds me of a geographer and biologist studying their subjects through art. I am challenged by his concepts and reminded of changes in myself that he demonstrates occurring within these other elements.

Below is an "story" from his site. The images are also of Burning Fields from his portfolio.

BURNING FIELDS



"I remember when the sky was full of smoke in the winter time, like I was in Abadon waiting to get out. This was, however, a deceiving feeling. The truth is: the fields are burned so that the next crop will flourish. It is the new end of the beginning. If the crops are not burned, the next generation of plants will accumulate the knowledge of their own demise like one generation teaching the next. It has something to do with the genetic code they read from each others' chlorophyll. If the fields are burned the genetic energy is transformed into fire and smoke and only the carbon is left to nourish the soil for the next generation of plants. The carbons' nutrients are strong, but carry no information about the past. It is ideal for the farmer to keep this in his soil. I suspect the plants are aware of their synthetic positioning in nature. It is not likely that so many things in nature could grow in such geometric precision and so close to each other. The plants are fed everyday and given all the appropriate nutrients so they just keep doing what they do best despite the minor discomfort they feel with the misalignment of their current situation and their prehistoric genes.





When they began burning the fields, there were a few men who could tell what the plants were thinking by how the smoke formed in the sky. These men were called entropy stenographers. It has taken many years to learn this and it is still not a perfect science since there is no possible way to confirm what the plants have said because they don't speak. Because of the massive amount of energy released in the fires, the transformation of their history is very fast so the entropy stenographers have to be able to 'speed read' so-to-speak, like a court room typist. Some people get so obsessed with wanting to know what all material has to say that they burn everything to the ground just to hear their stories. These people are called arsonists. The idea of killing something to hear it speak is absurd to me. There must be a more humane way of talking to nature . Some entropy stenographers have taken a vow to only read natural occurrences, like volcanoes or cyclones. There is some discrepancy amongst the entropy stenographers in regards to the way the wind in the atmosphere mix with the materials from earth. An example of a reading which might cause such a discrepancy would be that of a cyclone or hurricane. These discrepancies have formed two schools of thought; one which says the earth is separated into two distinct units (earth and sky) and the other which believes that the earth is complete in one mind and cannot be separated from the atmosphere and that only the pure emptiness of space creates a true separation between what is beautiful and what is nothing."