Audrey Hope
Hanging the Bear Cache
June 15 - July 13, 2019
This exhibition was part of a broader collaboration with poet/violinist Keir GoGwilt. Hanging the Bear Cache featured seven sculptures situated within a fabric scene. The installation also served as a set for a live performance by TREESEARCH, GoGwilt and bassist Kyle Motl.
“Bear caching” describes a range of strategies intended to protect human food while traveling in bear country. The most rudimentary of these methods involves hanging a container from the branch of a tree out of reach of bears. The result is a bag of food that hangs from a tree, a disturbing sculpture containing life force.
Two freestanding sculptures revisit the artist’s memories of bear caching in the wilderness. These sculptures frame a series of photographs that depict her father, aunt, and brother as they work to hang three days’ worth of food in an Ann Taylor LOFT shopping bag from a tree. After the food is hung, the family will hike deeper into the wilderness, across talice-covered moonscapes, before they return, hoping to collect the remainder of their freeze-dried meals.
Hope’s installations are often conceived as campsites: temporary arrangements of essentials for existence. In Hanging the Bear Cache these essentials include bundles of previous artworks, bear scat fur balls hanging from the ceiling, benches, cast aluminum pools of seawater, and a junk-encrusted drop cloth. The “drop cloth” is both a rug and a backdrop against which TREESEARCH will perform the music that served as the starting point for the installation. The music and the exhibition explore interconnected themes: tension, darkness, chaos, natural forms, family histories, and memory.
Audrey Hope holds her MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego, where she was a 2017 Frontiers of Innovation Scholar. She received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in association with Tufts University, and was awarded a 2014 Traveling Fellowship by the School. Recent solo exhibitions include Actual Size Los Angeles, DXIX Projects in Venice, CA and MaRS Gallery in Los Angeles, as well as group exhibitions at Centro de las Artes San Agustín in Oaxaca and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. She has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Ox-bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency.
Keir GoGwilt is a violinist and writer whose work has been presented at festivals including PS 122 COIL, Santiago a Mil, Luminato, Spoleto; he has soloed with groups including the Orchestra of St. Luke's and the Chinese National Symphony. He earned a BA in literature at Harvard, and was awarded the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts. Currently he is a PhD candidate in music at UCSD, where he is writing a history of romantic and modernist musical aesthetics from the perspective of performance pedagogy.
Kyle Motl is a bassist, composer, and improviser dedicated to the performance of creative music. Motl holds a BM from Florida Atlantic University and an MM from Florida International University. He holds a DMA from UC San Diego, where he studied bass with Mark Dresser and composition with Anthony Davis.
