Elizabeth Keithline
Only The Strong Survive

Main Gallery
November 9 – December 2, 2014
Opening Reception: Sunday, Nov. 9, 2 - 4 pm

The installation Only The Strong Survive features a group of full-scale, woven wire animals facing off against a ’69 Dodge Charger. The exhibit focuses on how human self-extension affects the animal kingdom.
 
In the last hundred years, human beings have developed a reliance on the gasoline engine that was largely helpful, until scientists confirmed the threat of global warming. Only The Strong Survive asks, what is strength now? What happens if the dependence that we’ve created shifts and begins to destroy us? Are animals, with their ability to replicate and to quickly return to the earth when they die, in some way actually “stronger” than cars?

Artist/curator Elizabeth Keithline invented a sculpture technique wherein wire is woven around an object and then burned out, leaving behind a wire memory. Her work has been exhibited at New York University, Mobius Boston, the Danforth Museum, the Newport Art Museum, Real Art Ways, the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, the Fuller Museum, the Center For Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh and many others. Keithline’s other curatorial conversations include the solo exhibit The Lost House Project with the group exhibit The Shadow Show and the solo exhibit Smarter, Faster, Higher with the group exhibit A Tool Is A Mirror.