dc3 Art Projects is pleased to present Crafting Ruin, Jude Griebel’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Within an immersive dystopian sculpture garden, Griebel will present a new body of sculptural work that focuses on current environmental turmoil and human consumption.

Griebel’s handcrafted sculptures of hybrid bodies are driven by themes of psychological struggle, transformation and mortality. Based between Sundre, AB and Brooklyn, NY, his work is both informed by his prairie upbringing and contemporary urban encounters. Drawing from anthropomorphic landscapes of the Renaissance era, Griebel’s bodies fuse with their environment, using dark, playful humour to confront contemporary anxieties surrounding our relationship to shifting environments.

In Crafting Ruin, Griebel focuses on how the inundation of media images of accumulation and degradation affect the human psyche. Drawing from both visual and conceptual techniques of natural science models, bodies composed of dirt are paved over and strewn with litter, oil tankers and trawlers give rise to new bodies and those made of garbage awkwardly traipse along. As these sculptural bodies merge with their surroundings, illusory dioramic elements of consumption, excess and disregard play out on their surfaces.

Grounded in the opposing presentations of scientific fact and imagined experience, Griebel attempts to destabilize existing narratives about the relationships of our bodies to the surrounding world. Combining grotesque representations from historical paintings and pop culture, Griebel’s sculptures explore the psychological and visual relationships between our selves and our shifting environment, in an age where the two have become irrefutably intertwined.

Jude Griebel was born in 1978 in Ottawa, Canada and lives and works between Sundre, AB, Canada and Brooklyn, NY, USA. He completed an MFA in Ceramics and Sculpture from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada in 2014, and has completed numerous residencies including MASS MoCA,North Adams, MA; the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY; HALLE 14 Center for Contemporary Art, Leipzig, Germany and the Kunstnarhuset Messen, Norway. His work was featured in Future Station: The 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Alberta, and recent solo exhibitions include Esker Foundation, Calgary, AB; Redpath Museum, Montreal,QC and Museum Lytke, Leipzig, Germany. Griebel is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant for emerging figurative artists.

The artist would like to acknowledge support of the work in the exhibition from Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts and The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.