Meridel Rubenstein began her professional career in the mid 1970’s, evolving from photographer of single photographic images to multi-media artist of large-scale installations. Her artworks are known for their unusual combinations of materials and ideas and from the beginning, her art making has argued for an awareness of how we are connected to place.

The newest work, Eden Turned on its Side, focuses on intersections of nature and culture in relationship to ecological and social imbalance. After millennia of destruction, can Eden be restored? Rubenstein explores this question in three parts:

Part I, Photosynthesis, the subject of this small exhibition, includes images of trees and people exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide throughout the seasons, in a post-Edenic and threatened relationship. Presented not as a timeline but as a natural cycle of life, death and rebirth, human beings and nature are visualized deeply connected and existing in a true, if threatened, symbiosis.

Part II, The Volcano Cycle, explores volcanoes from Indonesia’s Ring of Fire that evoke earth, climate change and human co-evolution. Here the destructive forces of Nature are observed to be regenerative.

Part III, Eden in Iraq, is set in the marshes of South­ern Iraq, a site said to be very near to the original Gar­den of Eden. Here Meridel is co-designing a wastewater garden/memorial site that aims to transform relics of war and destruction into art.

David Richard Gallery is pleased to represent Meridel Rubenstein