First Fridays Opening: Friday, July 1 at 5:30pm
Second Street Gallery
on view July 1 – 30, 2016

Listening Spirit: 5 Years of Burnside Farm is a collaborative installation featuring visual art, food activism, and programs by Detroit-based artist Kate Daughdrill and New York-based artist Patrick Costello, both former Charlottesville residents.

Listening Spirit is inspired by Burnside Farm, a six-lot urban farm on the east side of Detroit. Daughdrill bought a house on one of these lots for $600 in 2011. Working with her neighbors to make the house livable while cultivating the land around it, Daughdrill made Burnside Farm a hub for her artistic practice and a place for community activity. The Burnside gardens provide sustenance and engage the neighbors through a farmhouse/art gallery, large artist-made dinners, a gardening club for young women, seasonal art shows in the farm’s tiny shed, neighborhood vegetable trading, and an all-girls space in the farmhouse/art gallery.

Simply put, Burnside is a self-reliant space for living simply and for cultivating daily rituals for soulful living. While Burnside Farm’s creative projects evolve each year, the spirit of the farm always encourages a sense of well-being and healing that fully engages the people, plants and animals who contribute to it.

In Listening Spirit, Daughdrill’s and Costello’s composition includes shelves of jarred foods arranged in a color spectrum, a circular gathering table for sharing artist-made food and teas, a holy water station, plants, herbal medicines, ceremonial objects, an attuning station and the sounds and scents of Burnside. The show and installation feature additional contributions by artists: Ali Lapetina, Phreddy Wischusen, and the Printmakers Left, all who collaborate on art and events at Burnside Farm.

Aside from the installation, Listening Spirit also coalesces the story of Burnside Farm in a resource room featuring art objects, prints, a short film and a publication by Burnside collaborators.

Listening Spirit: 5 Years of Burnside Farm is generously supported by the Women 4 Art Exhibition Fund. It concludes Second Street Gallery’s Season 42, devoted to various notions– from environmental to cultural– of sustainable practice. SSG is enthusiastic about this presentation of Daughdrill’s and Costello’s installation centered around art, food and social engagement.

The exhibition opening on Friday, July 1 from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. will feature a medicinal food-tea pairing experience with a brief artist talk at 6:30 p.m. On July 2 from 11 a.m. – 1 p.m., Daughdrill and Costello will host a discussion/ritual to explore food sovereignty and healing.

Established in 1973, Second Street Gallery is a nonprofit contemporary art space located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Admission is free and donations are appreciated. The Gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm. Second Street Gallery is located at 115 Second Street SE, Charlottesville, VA. For more information, please visit our website: www.secondstreetgallery.org

 Image above: From Here to There, Daughdrill and Costello’s Art X Detroit Visual Art Exhibition, MOCAD, 2015