Art eco: Fall events along the Schuylkill have a green theme

THE INTERIOR of the barn at Brolo Hill Farm looked less like an artist's studio than it did a special backwoods episode of "Hoarders." More than 2,000 sticks, bundled and labeled with masking tape, covered the floor of an entire section and filled several shelves underneath a stuffed deer head.

Artist Jebney Lewis gestured somewhat abashed at the piles, explaining the work in progress in what was, at least temporarily, his makeshift studio at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education.

"There's a phenomenon in environmental ecology called hysteresis, which is basically that environments, instead of degrading linearly, tend to shift rapidly between two alternate stable states," Lewis said. If the artist's explanation sounds more appropriate coming from the mouth of a scientist, that may be attributable to the fact that he's collaborating with one - University of Pennsylvania mathematical biologist Todd Parsons.

Lewis is creating one of six pieces by members of Nexus, the Kensington-based artists' collective, at the Schuylkill Center's Brolo Hill Farm site for a show collectively titled "Ground Play." Each of the artists investigated the site, reflecting on its environmental qualities and on its educational mission, which resulted in the playfully exploratory pieces on display.

Over the next month, communities along the Schuylkill will be similarly engaging in spreading an environmental message through the arts. "Ground Play" will open at the Schuylkill Center on Sept. 19 with activities and live performances, though a sneak preview of some of the artists' designs and sketches will be displayed at the Nexus Foundation gallery in the Crane Building beginning Thursday.

The next weekend, the first annual Manayunk EcoArts Festival will celebrate artistic, sustainable and local green initiatives. The East Falls Arts By the River & Eco-Fair follows during the first weekend in October.

In layman's terms, the theory that prompted Lewis' obsessive stick-gathering mission has to do with sudden disruptions in the makeup of an environment that are difficult to reverse.

"I got a topographical map of the Schuylkill Center and walked around looking for an example of this and actually found it," Lewis said. "One of the nastiest changers of native landscapes is the Asian earthworm, which is great for farmers but [also] churns up the soil and makes it great for all these other invasive species to take over."

He found an example of the worms' work at the Schuylkill Center. To represent that break in environments (for those who haven't had their fill of the science, the term is bifurcation), Lewis gathered sticks from 10-foot intervals throughout the center to build a three-dimensional topographical map.

"Oftentimes artists are the first line of our society that has something to say about what's going on in the environment," said Peg Shaw, project and promotions manager at the East Falls Development Corp. (EFDC). The goal of Arts by the River & Eco-Fair, she explained, is to "increase the overall awareness in the region of the vibrancy and diversity that's here in East Falls."

Arts by the River is in its fifth year, and the ecological component is in its third, an outgrowth of the EFDC's communitywide "East Falls Goes Green!" initiative. That will be echoed in the fish-themed public-art installations created for the weekend. Art and crafts vendors will deal with ecology either in theme or in materials.

The East Falls festival joins the Manayunk and Schuylkill Center events through a project called Destination Schuylkill River, which was birthed in the offices of the Manayunk Development Corp. (MDC).

"The goal of Destination Schuylkill River is to help Philadelphians become engaged with the Schuylkill River, the towpath, the bike trails, our canal - all of the aspects of the river that run from East Falls through Shawmont," said Jane Lipton, executive director of the MDC.

The Manayunk EcoArts Festival was created as a greener sister festival to the annual Manayunk Arts Festival. EcoArts features artisans and craftspeople who use renewable resources and materials or promote eco-conscious messages. Local businesses will also promote their environmentally friendly practices. And the MDC has commissioned several artists to create pieces along the canal and towpath.

Milwaukee-based artist Roy Staab will suspend a piece above the canal made of invasive plant materials; Toronto artist Chrysanne Stathacos will build a floating sculpture of lotus leaves spelling the word "PURIFY." And New Yorker Chere Krakovsky will hang a clothesline on which she invites visitors to hang articles of clothing while she welcomes them at an outdoor kitchen table.

"The Manayunk Canal was once home to vital manufacturers of paper and fabric, materials used for practical as well as creative functions," Krakovsky said, adding that her piece "can be seen as a self-portrait comprised of clothing, household and other fabrics that identify a history of myself, my mother and my grandmother."

The clothesline "reminds us of a not too distant past where wind and sun were harnessed to dry the laundry and we shared our lives with our neighbors."

Similar themes of the man-made and the natural coexisting predominate at the Schuylkill Center. Michael McDermott, aka electronic musician Mikronesia, has created a quartet of musical instruments from natural materials that are played by the wind.

"The idea of the piece was to highlight the beauty of nature by focusing on sound," McDermott said. "The sounds they make should all be subtle and quiet sounds, so I want the listener to focus in on those. When they do that they'll hear the overall sound of the wind and distant bugs."

As McDermott brings the listener down to the level of nature, Susan Abrams conversely enlarges nature to seize the viewer. Her large-scale photographs of minuscule flora from the site are framed within the windows of the abandoned Brolo Hill farmhouse.

"I zeroed in on small things that people overlook," Abrams said, "and then made them really big so you can't overlook them."

Nick Cassway's piece installs 36 drawings in the form of incongruously placed street signs. "I wanted to use my piece to draw attention to the location of the Schuylkill Center within the confines of the city of Philadelphia," Cassway said. "It's such an unusual setting and feels so rural when you go out there."

There is a playful component to several of the pieces, reflecting the many children who visit the Schuylkill Center. None more so, despite the clinical name, than Leah Reynolds' "Combustibility of Hay and Farmer's Lung," a brightly colored rumination on the fungus known to make bales of hay spontaneously ignite that takes over an entire outside wall of the barn. Jennie Thwing, too, gets playful, with a trio of white linen tents on which projected silhouettes will enact historical scenes.

"The artists very directly responded to the actual space and its history," said Jenny Laden, associate director of the Center's Environmental Art Program. "These aren't pieces that were just made in a studio and brought out here and stuck somewhere. The Schuylkill Center is about educating people about the environment and using our actual environment to do that, so I feel like this show is very much aligned with our mission. It's just a different way of educating people."