Exhibition Description
Simone DeSousa EDITION is pleased to present OTHER NATURE, a collaboration project between Emmy Bright and Megan Heeres in which the natural world is both subject and metaphor.
Using paper, screen-printing, and collage, the work plays between binaries: natural/unnatural, native/invasive, pretty/ugly, joyful/tearful, and other new language and forms that we don’t have words for yet. Each artist is invested in complicating these binaries – finding beauty in garbage, celebrating female masculinity, mashing up weeds to make fine papers. Their method of working together is process oriented,responding intuitively to the materials, images, and forms in front of them. Through this practice, they find intent and joy in the objects that they create.
At the center of the installation is Megan Heeres’ artist book: The More We Get Together. Emmy Bright worked as Meg’s master printer, producing the printed images onto Heeres’ handmade Phragmites paper pages. This limited edition book documents the Invasive Paper Project which challenges notions about our landscapes, what we consider native, non-native, and invasive and how these distinctions arose.
Other works in the EDITION feature come from their individual practices and their new print and plant based collaboration. Emmy Bright is represented by David Klein Gallery in Detroit.
Emmy Bright is an artist working across print, writing and performance. She holds a BA in Art History from the University of Chicago, an M.Ed from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an MFA at Cranbrook in Print Media. She has received merit fellowships at Cranbrook and Ox-Bow School of Art in Michigan, Haystack School of Crafts in Maine, and New Urban Arts in Providence, RI. She has performed and exhibited nationally and has produced commissioned projects for the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Massachusetts and Brown University in Rhode Island. Bright has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Quirk Gallery, Penland School of Crafts, and 186 Carpenter St. Gallery. She currently serves on the Programming Committee for OxBow and is the incoming Artist in Residence and Co-Director of the Print Media Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She currently lives in Detroit where she is represented by David Klein Gallery.
A native Michigander, Megan Heeres returned home from the West Coast in 2007 to study at Cranbrook Academy of Art where she earned her MFA. Megan has been involved in the local arts community for over ten years as an advocate, volunteer, and teacher, all roles she plays currently with her Invasive Paper Project. She participates in projects locally and nationally, most recently at the Center for the Book in New York City and the Salina Art Center in Kansas. Megan has been an artist-in-residence at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, the Michele Schara Residency at the Brightmoor Makerspace in Detroit, the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico, the Pyramid Atlantic Center for the Arts in Hyattsville, Maryland, and the Women’s International Study Center in Santa Fe.