The Newsmagazine of Long Beach Island and Southern Ocean County

By Victoria Ford | on June 16, 2022

LIFE CYCLES: Juror Linda Weintraub talks about her biophilic life. (Photos by Jack Reynolds)

The four elements and the infinite imagination are interwoven in the national juried exhibition that opened Saturday at the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences in Loveladies and runs through July 4.

For “Elemental Effects: Water + Wind + Earth + Fire,” artists were called upon to “abandon ego” and explore/connect with earthly and art-making processes innovatively, to wide-ranging effect. The show, as a whole, presents and interprets intersections of art with science and design – welcoming the “revolting” and even macabre to play a part in the creation, while coming off as “ultimately optimistic,” according to juror Linda Weintraub.

Be transported to a primitive form of self while viewing the pieces on display; allow instinct to fuel emotion. The show fills the main gallery and continues outdoors with 12 three-dimensional works installed along the Foundation’s nature trail, which goes behind the camp building and halfway down Tidal Drive.

Weintraub commended participants for pioneering an art form and for going beyond the materials to make a statement about humanity in collaboration with non-human sources.

First-place winner Laurie Sheridan’s “Rust, Air and Soot” is (de)composed of wheelbarrow, tillandsia or Spanish moss, and burned bones, built on a theme of transformation.

In second place, Beth Haber’s “Beach Reads (Silica Edition)” is made of olivine (a silicate mineral found in igneous rock), sand, acrylic, paper, driftwood, hourglass and opening page text from Rachel Carson’s Edge of the Sea.

Capturing third place, meanwhile, was Sam Horowitz’s actual freezer, “Merge (Circulation),” a metaphor for climate change, for which he used a modified freezer, frost and ice core from the South Pole and from inner-city glaciers of Boston and Buffalo.

Take a cruise around and look at the materials and mediums listed in the descriptions on the labels: ash, mud, mirror, stereoscopic pinhole photography, wax (encaustic), smoke, algae … glacial residue. And mushrooms! Meanwhile, collaborators Caroline Hatfield and Patricia Tinajero entered “Com/posted,” made of laser-cut paper and, ahem, slime mold.

See methods of printing (photogram or light exposure without a camera; cyanotype; steam; anthotype or lichen dye) on paper and other substrates.

Stare in awe at Margaret LeJeune’s “Watershed” triptych, a set of three bioluminescent photograms with dinoflagellates and USGS hydrology maps. Be amused and impressed by Dana Michele Hemes’ turf-covered Adirondack chair, “Fescue/Homo 2,” made of wood, artificial turf and hardware. Gaze into Bonnie Ralston’s “Hubble Ultra Deep Field” series, which gets salts, vinegar and rust playing together on cotton paper.

New LBIF member Brunella DeMarco of Whiting is just retired and eager to spend more time on artistic and intellectual pursuits. She was so impressed by everything she had taken in Saturday, she was near speechless, her eyes wide as she savored a bite from the catered goodies from Foodies. The combination of the art on display and the juror talk had DeMarco feeling stimulated and looking forward to pouring new energy into her own passions, for painting, photography and food.

Foundation Executive Director Daniella Kerner called it an honor to have Weintraub in attendance.

Weintraub has curated more than 60 exhibitions and practices eco art as an author, educator, curator, practitioner and homesteader, championing the outposts of vanguard experimentation in the arts as they have evolved over the decades. She has authored essays and books exploring contemporary art and ecology and written on ecocentric art topics such as biophilic design principles, which was the topic of her talk and book signing that accompanied the opening reception and awards.

Biophilia or “love of life” is humans’ longing for deep connection with nature and other life forms, according to Edward O. Wilson, the naturalist credited with introducing and popularizing the term, in his 1984 book by the same name.

For human ancestors on the savannah, Weintraub explained, “survival depended on us really being integrated with our environment, which means this is in our DNA.

“We have evolved to be a part of the outdoors, to be sensitive to wind and temperature and sunlight and to the movement of wild critters,” she said.

For Weintraub, biophilic principles “inspire my homesteading practices, my curating, art making and writing. Indeed, they provide the ethical foundation for all my beliefs and behaviors.”

By contrast, the prevailing designs of houses and buildings, in her opinion, are “biophobic,” meant to keep people disconnected from nature. The vast majority of modern human life is spent indoors or in an enclosed vehicle.

“Biophilia is not a style,” she said. “It’s a predictable condition, with results that are beneficial to us all.”

Weintraub’s recent book, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet, is an intimate look at “artistic responses to environmental issues (that) tackle and transform complex global problems that influence and affect humankind and other species, as well as ecological systems,” Kerner said by way of an introduction.

People on LBI love extraordinary residential homes, Kerner added.

Weintraub and her husband Andy (whom she met at a dance and married as a teenager) have built eight homes together by hand, she explained in the darkened Blai Gallery, her projector poised. They found over the years designing and building homes was the one thing that brought them together, she said, “because every decision had to be a shared decision.” The homes have charted the different periods of their life as they raised three children and grew as a family and as individuals.

“Every one of those houses was experimental,” she said. “There was not a conventional house among them.”

The couple’s shared design sensibility is: “Any opportunity we can find to get away from a straight line, we’re going to take it.”

They are not trained architects, she said, but rather learners and lovers, dreamers and doers. One of their projects was an 18th century stone barn, complete with ladders and lofts. They turned the interior into an angular, artsy, airy living space. Their sixth was a “modern pseudo-Victorian.” The seventh was a culmination, on an uncultivated 11-acre piece of land Weintraub loved at first sight. The eighth is about a month from completion and is a conscious manifestation and true reflection of what she has come to understand as her “biophilia.

Challenged to dig beneath beauty to discover what else can land be – what can it do and mean, why do we want to own it, live on it? – she began to learn. She began to work with the land in gentle (and more rewarding) ways, to solve problems using natural solutions, gathering materials onsite, building stone terraces, floors and pathways, braiding natural fencing with branches and limbs that add a “visual symphonic” element, and avoiding at all costs a trip to a big-box home improvement store.

On property number seven, “we were becoming really close to being self-sufficient, and that gave us a sense of real security.”

They made their own soil to produce their own food: bread from their own yeast, mushrooms from their own contraptions. They constructed an indoor aviary and fish pond. The home itself was a prefab Galvalume (aluminum-zinc alloy-coated sheet steel) building. Typically used for storage or helicopter ports, the Weintraubs are among the first to use one such industrial structure as a dwelling.

“They are extremely efficient, and very inexpensive, and even quite beautiful – but that is up for grabs, I guess,” she said.

Steel is maintenance-free and never deteriorates, she added. “Everything else is biodegradable, but not the exterior.”

Forty gallons of maple sap yields one gallon of syrup, she noted. So she started to think about how she could give back to the maples, in thanks. She would burn fallen limbs and use the resulting ashes to nourish the young vital trees. Cycles of living and dying inform her artistic work and life – i.e., the question of, “How can dying support the living?” and how the answer might solve ecological problems.

Home number eight, in Trumansburg, N.Y., is a work in progress that challenges commonly held assumptions of what a house should look like and be, Weintraub explained. It started as a 4-acre mess that took 10 months to clean up, she said. They’re getting ready to move in this summer.

“Architecture is … a whole approach to living that is as designable as much as the walls of your house,” she said. To make the plaster for the walls of their house, the Weintraubs used clay from the property. Again they chose Galvalume, which blends into the setting as it reflects the colors of sky and foliage.

“These buildings kind of vanish. They’re not intrusive on the landscape,” she said.

The architectural principle of “prospect and refuge” – referring to humans’ comfort with looking out, combined with a desire to feel safe and protected from the elements – is applied throughout. Windows are arranged to integrate the view outward with the shapes of the natural landscape.

“We wanted to feel like we were sleeping in the treetops,” she explained.

The couple in their design-build journeys embrace the cracks, the patinas and stains, the natural marks of time, as humans and earth break down. That’s what happens, as Weintraub sees it:

“My body is decomposing. We’re decomposing. We’re in harmony with each other. Things aren’t meant to last forever. It’s really OK.”

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