This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 11, 2013 - Meredith Foster is a local artist whose subject is local ecosystems. Her Mississippi Delta exploration bounces from wall to wall to floor in the Millstone Gallery at the Center of Creative Arts.
Foster has printed abstracted landscape photographs upon lightweight paper and tacked them to the wall without frame or canvas. The arrangements of photographed images tiled across white paper function schematically as a single composition. She has captured geometries found in green grasses, riverbeds, cracked earth, dead fish, burning fields and their charred remains. Here Foster takes nature as she finds it, but by displaying each as part of a whole, transforms the individual images into schematized textures and patterns.
Foster’s photographic arrangements play well with her mixed media work, which mimics geographic reality. Here, Foster has created topographical representations of her natural subject, but intricately constructed them to suggest scientific objectivity. The grey, white and black textural topographies form a visual metaphor for the geography of central Illinois. Clearly demarcated gritty trapezoidal shapes are laid beside puffy or flat shapes to take the form of a map.
Foster created her 32 individual mixed media drawings (titled Acre) and her floor installation (Biography) from salt, ash and graphite. She processes her materials from indigenous and invasive plant material growing in East central Illinois.
The floor installation looks like a moonscape. A black and gray terrain is surrounding by yellow tape like a police line. Standing above it, one surveys the region spread flat against the floor.
Foster has designed a meditation on her and our environment, segmenting and parceling expansive vistas into small components. Through her photographs, vast fields are made small. Through her multi-media work, we look down upon carefully articulated land contours as if from an airplane.
The dynamic arrangement of Foster’s photograph composites, mixed media topographies and floor installation invites comparisons between them and draws attention to what is seen and what is perceived. Foster’s provocative use of materials and images combine to gives this exhibit the potential to instigate discursive engagement on the place we live.
Sarah Hermes Griesbach is a freelance writer.