Conceived and Curated by Raul Zamudio
July 8 – August 15, 2010

The Waste Land is the inaugural exhibition of the Project Birch Forest series to be presented at White Box throughout the summer. The first iteration culls its title from T.S. Eliot’s poem by the same name. Considered to be a milestone of twentieth-century modernist poetry, Eliot’s magnum opus is written in extended verse and mines a myriad of sources creating an open-ended, literary work par excellence. The poem is used as touchstone for a topical exhibition consisting of an array of media including painting, sculpture, work-on-paper, photography, video, and installation. One of its well known stanzas, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” has different connotations altogether within the backdrop of ecological and cataclysmic disaster underscored in the BP oil spill, Icelandic volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis. The Waste Land uses Eliot’s poem as a foil to dovetail on social and political issues endemic to our contemporary, globalized world.

Artworks, however, are not presented via conventional modes of display, but are exhibited within a simulacrum of a primeval, arbor-like environment that constitutes the Project Birch Forest.