Mary Babcock and Susan Andrews Grace: Oh, Columbia!

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Mary Babcock, "Gallery Installation, in progress," 2015

Installation with wax paper

Closing Reception & Artist Talk:  Friday, January 31, 7:00 - 9:00 PM

Oxygen Art Centre presents Hawaii-based artist Mary Babcock with local artist and writer Susan Andrews Grace in the exhibition, “Oh, Columbia!” The exhibition is the culmination of their collaborative residency that took place in December 2019.

New exhibition, “Oh, Columbia!” opens at the Oxygen Art Centre. The exhibition is the culmination of American artist Mary Babcock’s two-week residency at Oxygen, coupled with the soundscape by local artist and writer, Susan Andrews Grace. The artists worked in a parallel fashion, Babcock in wax paper and Andrews Grace with sound, to explore water as a symbol of climate change. In particular, the relationship between the historic flooding of Columbia River  and the current rapid melting of the Greenland’s ice sheet. Together the artists created a cautionary tale that is both sublime and alarming.

Mary Babcock (www.marybabcock.com) is currently Professor of Sculpture and Expanded Practices and Chair of the Graduate Program in Studio Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She received her MFA from the University of Arizona, BFA from University of Oregon, Ph. D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Mary Babcock is interested in the intersection of art, contemplation and social activism. Influenced by the confluence of Buddhist practice and an appreciation of everyday acts of care, she holds mending as a central theme in her work, both as an actual reparative action and as a metaphor for personal and social change.

Babcock and Andrews Grace’s residency will explore archival and material transformations of the 1948 catastrophic dike collapse along the Columbia River in Vanport, Oregon. Constructed from household wax paper, the installation is intended as a cautionary tale regarding the impacts of reckless greed, drawing parallels to current global existential threats and to our apparent acquiescence with climate apartheid.