Each year The Greene Fellowship hosts a culminating exhibition, showcasing the fellows' work and furthering our mission to connect contemporary artists with community and inspire creativity.
Ambits
The exhibition was curated by Richard Torchia, former Director of Arcadia Exhibitions at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa.
From left to right: Laura Shill, Hannah Agosta, Alexander Blume, Richard Torchia, Max Maddox, and Chelsea Kaiah
The 2023 inaugural Greene Fellowship exhibition featured the work of the first three fellows: Chelsea Kaiah, Laura Shill, and Max Maddox.
The works in this exhibition enact critical forms of testing the limits of cultural traditions, the public commons, and bodily contact.
Despite their apparent incongruity, these recent projects by the three inaugural Greene Fellows share a concern for how such boundaries can be questioned while also proposing unexpected forms of engagement.
The word "ambit," which means "the scope, extent, or bounds of something," offers itself as a flexible term that also references the degree of a statute or regulation as well the sphere of influence and authority of an agency, topics that surfaced consistently in my studio conversations with Kaiah, Maddox, and Shill.
The term also brings with it a sense of "span" or "reach," words which imply the measured presence of a performing body. Equally important as another unifying principle is each artist's use of distinctive materials and cultivated processes that help to establish the specific parameters of their quiet transgressions.
Aesthetic Impermanence & Artificial Geologies
The 2025 exhibition presented two solo shows, Aesthetic Impermanence by Alex Branch and Artificial Geologies by Phillip David Stearns.
Guest curated by George Bolster, Curator at the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation.
In this time of continuous attacks on science in favor of origin stories and the projections of fantasies on reality, many artists—including Stearns and Branch—have once again become fascinated by it, reflecting its research in their aesthetic practices.
While Alex Branch and Phillip Stearns presentations might not immediately seem to share many correlations, it is a trust and experimentation in scientific subjects and narratives that unites them.
Aesthetic Impermanence
Alex Branch’s recent practice conflates science in the form of an ongoing study of entropy, with a poetic sensibility evident in metaphoric visual narratives. Aesthetic Impermanence features her works in a broad variety of media including photography, stop motion animation and sculpture. Collectively, they investigate time, cycles of life, the bodily fragility, and the ephemerality of objects.
Humans exact their will on the world through physical strength. While it has the illusion of permanence, it is temporary. For Branch, a sculptor who for a period of time lost that faculty, it must have been an impossible prospect for the longevity of her practice. This mortalizing event resulted in a dream, where the artist’s limbs were buried in the icy surface of a mountain top.
Another outcome is an ongoing range of works including photographs Suspended Animation, Liminal Thaw, and Artifact, and the sculpture When It’s Darker Than It Is Now, And the Snow Is Colder, all 2025. Each depicts her appendages and/or blocks of ice in various stages of liberation.
This direct interfusing of humans with nature is also evident in works such as Passing Through You Like Wind Through A Wind Chime a sculpture in a dress form made from dandelion seed puffs, and a corresponding stop motion animation film The Foreignness of What You No Longer Are of a woman’s hair covered in gradually blooming dandelion stalks.
Branch’s practice is ultimately one of flux: every element is in a state of change; time-based, shapeshifting, transforming. Through foregrounding these factors, she visually communicates the impossibility of stasis in nature.
From left to right: Jane Burke, George Bolster, Alex Branch, Phillip Stearns, Hannah Agosta
Alex Branch, Liminal Thaw, 2024, Photographic print on hahnemuhle rag paper. Courtesy of the artist.
Artificial Geologies
Phillip Stearn's work in Artificial Geologies excavates research methodologies utilized in geology through employing the discipline’s visual vocabulary. His application of artificial tectonic forces turns a multitude of waste products into rocks and core samples representing igneous and sedimentary forms.
Stearns confronts us with facts, they are simultaneously beautiful and unpleasant, and while the artist intends us to face current dilemmas such as poisoning in packaging and the wastefulness of takeaway culture, he couches these problems in compellingly attractive sculptures such as Plasticene Artifact 2025 05 10, and photographic prints Plasticene Material Study 5 Split Full Scan, 2025. Through his composition of these forms, he redeems them from what they – as separate elements signified, essentially trash.
There is something shocking about his cataloging in the form of lists of the materials, which make up these sculptures, and each one confronts viewers with their own culpability, because biological weathering cannot break down these materials. This further complicates the interpretation of the works, as with any body of human knowledge, science has been a double edged sword that has placed us in a catch 22 situation.
Its development of plastics through chemistry has caused a massive environmental crisis, but we also have to place trust in it because it has also allowed us to see – through studies in geology and other branches – the damage humans have done and continue to do through the Anthropocenic epoch.
While there is hopelessness in the depiction of our current relationship to the world, there is profound hope in the work of Alex Branch and Phillip Stearns, particularly in making us embody reality, if we can embrace that then we can then set about changing it.
