Notes from Downstream

If all the world was a river, how would we situate ourselves in its flow? Elizabeth (EJ) Trefney’s work dives into rushing waters and swims among smooth currents, weaving images of the natural world into past and present, distant and familiar. Objects and specimens foreground Adrianne Huang’s work, which prefers to embark on a riverside search, turning over rocks and peering into crevices. Notes from downstream considers both artists’ approaches to questions of observation, collection, and coexistence in an exhibition of drawings, prints, and zines. Elizabeth’s Dawn Chorus and Adrianne’s catalog weave together depictions of material scenes and entities to convey the intangible resilience, magnetism, and intimacy of nature. Looking to ancestral practices and peculiar objects, these projects engage in a dialogue with the natural world through careful depictions of earth, sea, sky, and heritage.

Dawn Chorus tells stories of environmental resilience through a series of cyanotype prints, graphite drawings, and handmade wooden frames. These artworks bear witness to nature’s gentleness alongside its unforgiving strength in wake of climate change. From ancestral homelands in Armenia to the Haw River shoreline in Elizabeth’s backyard, these artworks serve as a collection of regional climate portraits.

A series of ink drawings and handmade zines that resemble cabinets of curiosity, the catalog considers the acts of collecting and observing natural and manmade objects. The series works to unpack, and at times remake, structures of categorization by purposefully presenting items in abstractly connected groups, without any discernibly meaningful organization or hierarchy within. Do we seek order by nature, or because we’ve created a world that necessitates it?