Fernando Casasempere: 'TERRA'

In a new special exhibition of works by living artist Fernando Casasempere at San Diego Museum of Art, you'll find four distinct installations, each revolving around Casasempere's use of clay, color and the earth's deeply rooted history — specifically the industrial waste from Chilean copper mines. This exhibition opens in conjunction with Art Alive, the museum's annual floral show, and is Casasempere's first solo exhibition in the U.S. On view in the museum's first floor galleries 4 and 5.

Related events:
Tuesday, May 3, 2022, 10:00 a.m. to noon: Art and the Environment: An Artist Panel Discussion

From the museum:
Fernando Casasempere (b. 1958) moved to London from Santiago in 1997 with 12 tons of earth from his native Chile. He uses the earth as his medium as well his subject to explore ideas of landscape, architecture, and history with a foreboding sense of environmental collapse.

The four installations of the exhibition include:

• Reframing Our Relationship with the Earth features a mound of earth with thousands of individually hand-pressed clay components resembling bone fragments that speak to humans’ impact on the planet.
• Earth Book/The Sphere of Things to Come presents a series of clay books and a spherical structure representing the earth, together making up a physical archive of what may be lost if no change is made.
• Salares features hanging landscape formations made of clay that pay homage to the salt flats of the Chilean Atacama Desert, as well as enlarged mortar bowls that speak of itinerant diasporas, representing civilizations forced to flee from natural disasters caused by the changing climate.
• Reminiscences presents ceramic constructions representing fragments of archaeological ruins, gesturing to the threat of cultural loss due to humans’ extractive relationship with the Earth.

Read more here.

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