In celebration of the year-long Greene Fellowship program, RedLine is delighted to announce two solo exhibitions featuring the 2025 Greene Fellows:
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.
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.
Image: Alex Branch, Liminal Thaw, 2024, Photographic print on hahnemuhle rag paper. Courtesy of the artists.
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