Living on the Edge Exhibition

Living on the Edge was the culmination of EcoArt SoFla’s pilot artist apprenticeship, EcoArt Treasure Coast. The pilot was a joint effort from November 2010-January 2011 between EcoArt South Florida and the Martin County Arts Council, Inc., funded by the Community Foundation of Palm Beach and Martin Counties, the State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and private donors, and was the first ever EcoArt apprenticeship and community education program in the state of Florida.

All the works documented in the show were experiments and were in various stages of completion at the exhibition. The exhibition, created and curated by Mary Jo Aagerstoun and Osvaldo Monzon, featured installations by the five EcoArt Treasure Coast apprentices:

 Jesse Etelson worked in collaboration with scientists from the Four Rivers Audubon Wildlife Refuge to create unusual experimental sculptural ceramic bird shelters designed for particular native and visiting bird species, and installed in refuge areas where restoration efforts had removed many trees. Jesse is now working with an ornithologist on approaches to monitoring the shelters to see how effectively they attract inhabitants, and completed a post-apprenticeship summer 2011 internship with wildlife EcoArtist Lynn Hull in Colorado.

Gail Kosowki developed a community garden in collaboration with the Building Bridges Food Bank located in East Stuart. Her project aimed to inform the community on food safety and security issues and encourage local food supply. She also developed a working model, exhibited at the show, of a stormwater capture system that funneled storm water from the roof of the food bank into two locations, a spiral shaped green wall on the West side of the building, and a whimsical cistern shaped like a hand holding a funnel that looks like an umbrella. She is seeking funding to build the green wall, and the stormwater-capture system.

Mary Segal and Brenda Leigh: Collaborative project with Stuart and Jensen High School science and art students in which they collected plastic debris and created a room-filling installation entitled 40%, bringing to attention the percentage of the world’s ocean that is covered with plastic debris. Their project had an activist aspect as they collaborated with the Surfrider Foundation in gathering signatures for a petition to Martin County Commissioners to ban single use plastics in the County.

Jamie Powell worked alongside his fellow EcoArt apprentices on designing, building, selection of plants for, and installation of a water-cleaning floating islands experiment at the Florida Oceanographic Society. One of the project’s main goals was to see which of several designs utilizing nontoxic materials and different salt-loving plants would work best to clean the brackish water of the Florida Oceanographic Society’s lagoon. The ultimate aim was to create water cleaning “islands” that could be deployed along the shoreline of the Indian River Estuary, attached to artificial oyster reefs, giving an above water surface presence to the reefs.

Renowned New York EcoArtist, Betsy Damon, mentored the apprentices. She is the director of Keepers of the Waters, an international non profit organization created to promote and inspire installations and projects that merge art, science and community involvement aiming to restore, remediate and preserve water sources.