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Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art
Charleston, SC

Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art
College of Charleston School of the Arts
The Marion and Wayland H. Cato Jr. Center for the Arts
161 Calhoun St, 1st floor
Charleston, South Carolina 29401
(843) 953-HICA (4422)
Map

Contact:
Lizz Biswell at BiswellL@cofc.edu
Bryan Granger at GrangerBW@cofc.edu


www.halsey.cofc.edu

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Exhibitions

Kirsten Stolle: ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT A FOREST


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Kirsten Stolle: ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT A FOREST
Through December 10, 2022

Using appropriation, wordplay, and humor, Kirsten Stolle co-opts advertising strategies used by agrichemical corporations to resurface and critique company history. For her exhibition, Only You Can Prevent A Forest, Stolle will create photo-based collages, visual poetry interventions, text-based sound animation, a neon wall piece, and her first site-responsive sculptural installation. Building upon her decade-long research into companies like Bayer/Monsanto and Dow Chemical, the work will forefront historical ties to chemical warfare and reveal persistent greenwashing. Stolle’s work interrogates the global influence of chemical companies on our food supply and their consistent efforts to downplay effects of their toxic products on our health and environment.

Exhibition Essay Excerpt
From The Artist in the Archive: The Discoveries of Kirsten Stolle, By Hannah Star Rogers
Stolle’s work not only gleans from corporate fields but also plants new ideas for viewers. Art-science work can be thought of in four major categories: conveyance, contributive, contextual, and critical modes.1 Stolle’s artworks carry all of these categories. Combined, they offer viewers new discoveries about relationships for which they may have never seen textual evidence. Information is being conveyed through this but so are critical modes with which viewers can approach these details with an understanding of the broader context of corporate connections. This gives rise to the most exciting aspect to Stolle’s work: its potential to contribute new knowledge by bringing together newly formed strands of thought which can form into new narratives for viewers.

The artist in the archive returns to us with innovative ways to visualize social realities and relationships achieved through seductive colors and forms that draw us into textual complications. Even as the artist reveals our condition through dystopic histories, her works lead viewers toward awareness of Bayer-Monsanto and Dow’s greenwashing by exposing their historical connections to warfare and encouraging viewers toward curiosity about the role of such companies in their everyday lives. Stolle’s works leave open the possibility of the better future chemical companies could never provide: the future Stolle has planted through these artworks.

1. Along with Megan K. Halpern, I offered a preliminary version of this typology which can help to analyze the contributions of projects at the intersection of art and science. See Rogers and Halpern, “Art-Science Collaborations, Complexities, and Challenges,” in Routledge Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology, 3rd edition, eds. Massimiano Bucchi and Brian Trench, 214-237 (New York: Routledge, 2021).

Kirsten Stolle: Only You Can Prevent A Forest is funded in part by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the South Carolina Arts Commission, and with the generous support of Charleston magazine, and Mindelle Seltzer and Robert Lovinger.

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