Nurturing Nature, a group show co-curated by Amy Lipton and Patricia Miranda at Concordia College’s OSilas Gallery premieres Cortada’s 180 pencil drawings of endangered animals struggling to survive across the 180 degrees of our planet’s Eastern Hemisphere.

Xavier Cortada’s drawings are part of his “Endangered World” project which has addressed global biodiversity loss through art installations at the South Pole (2007), North Pole (2008), Holland (2009) and Biscayne National Park (2010) and through online participatory art projects through www.endangeredworld.org.

Participatory Component:LifeWall

Gallery visiitors will be able to participate in Xavier Cortada’s “Endangererd World: Life Wall, an eco-art project he launched at the Hunebed Center in the Netherlands’ Drenthe Province.  The installation depicts participants’ online contributions to the project.

Through eco-actions, participants “adopt” one of the 360 endangered animals featured in Xavier Cortada’s “Endangered World: Life Wall.”

On a found stone, participants paint the longitude of the animal they’ve adopted.  They keep their marked stone in a conspicuous place (e.g., a paperweight on your desk) as a daily reminder of the sustainable practice they’ve promised to engage in support of their adopted animal.  (See participants’ photos.)

Xavier Cortada 

Endangered World: Life Wall

Installation of eco-actors’ participation (photo images of marked stones inside sealed, clear, plastic bags; each aligned by the longitude where their adopted animal struggles for survival), 2010. 

Artist’s Statement

Although we are using stones to build it, our Endangered World:  Life Wall is a different kind of sculpture than the one I built in Holland.. I see this one primarily as a “social sculpture” –a term coined by artist Joseph Beuys (“every one is an artist”). The wall is erected as every participant artist performs an eco-action on behalf of an endangered animal living along one of Earth’s 360 longitudes.  

This is not to say that our Life Wall cannot also have a physicality. The wall is, after all, made of stones — each hand-pained by the participant with the longitude where their “adopted” animal struggles for survival.

Our wall isn’t vertical, though.  The stones — placed in conspicuous locations (e.g., on top of a desk or night stand) as a daily reminders of the eco-action pledged by participants on behalf of their endangered species — lie flat on a plane across South Florida.  And beyond.  Indeed, the Life Wall is as large as the farthest distance (think globally) between the two closest stones.

Much like electrons are contained in an atom, I envision our stones are held together as a “wall” across these vast distances by the force of each participant’s eco-actions.  The more participants engage in sustainable practices, the stronger the bond.

The stronger our Life Wall.

— Xavier Cortada

Artist

About Atlantic White Cedar

• • Chamaecyparis thyoides

Atlantic white cedar

Evergreen, aromatic tree with narrow, pointed, spirelike crown and slender, horizontal branches. Atlantic white-cedar is a columnar, evergreen tree, 40-75 ft. high, (often taller in the wild), with short, ascending branches and blue-green, scale-like leaves on twigs spreading in a fan-like manner. At maturity, the trunk is devoid of branches for 3/4 of its length. Bark is ashy-gray to reddish-brown.

Ancient logs buried in swamps have been mined and found to be well preserved and suitable for lumber. Pioneers prized the durable wood for log cabins, including floors and shingles. During the Revolutionary War, the wood produced charcoal for gunpowder. One fine forest is preserved at Green Bank State Forest in southern New Jersey. As an ornamental, this species is the hardiest of its genus northward.

Duration: Perennial
Habit: Tree
Size Class: 36-72 ft.
Fruit Type: Cone
Leaf Color: Green
Fruit Color: Bluish

Water Use: Low
Light Requirement: Part Shade
Soil Moisture: Wet
CaCO3 Tolerance: None
Soil Description: Moist, sandy soil.
Conditions Comments: This species thrives in a cool, moist atmosphere where it is protected from drying winds. It is relatively free of serious disease or insect problems and not susceptible to apple-cedar rust. It does not compete with hardwood species.

Description: Seed germination is usually low, due in part to poor seed quality, and also to embryo dormancy. Softwood or semi-hardwood cuttings are the principal means of propagation.
Seed Collection: Cones mature in Sept. and Oct. at the end of the first growing season. Each cone scale bears from 1-5 winged seeds.
Seed Treatment: Warm-moist stratify for 30 days then stratify 30 more days at 40 degrees. A cool-moist stratification alone may improve germination also.
Commercially Avail: yes