Matthew Best

Installation shot of Suburban Foraging in Public Spaces in Open Air @ the Nave Gallery, opening today, running until September 26.

http://artsomerville.org/nave/2010/openair.html

The section to the left is my foraging activities in 2009, each vertical column represents the month. The images are arranged chronologically (more or less...)  It begins in February of 2009 and ends in November 2009. It expands and contracts with the coming of spring and summer. The right section is a portion of 2010, still under development.

Detail shot:

 The installation consists of multiple deconstructed sketchbook pages. I take these sketchbooks with me as I go out to parks, yards (with permission...) and I sketch what I find there and/or document the plants that I harvest there. Each page encapsulate an experience, a plant  I found, the weather, smells, anything that makes that experience unique. They serve as both a diary and a calender that I can refer back to again and again.

I am playing with new arrangements for the next exhibition of my Suburban Foraging series in Open Air at the  Nave Gallery in Somerville, MA in September 2010. On display, exhibited for the first time, will be my foraging sketchbook drawings executed in 2009 and 2010

The work has been displayed in horizontal rows twice now. This arrangement will be in vertical rows by month, mirroring the passage of the seasons.

The pictures are of my playing with the pages on the floor of my studio in Hartford, CT.