Brent Green: Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then

artwithoutwalls announces the premiere of Brent Green’s multi-media installation Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (2010), presented in collaboration with LOT (Land of Tomorrow) at 233 West Broadway, and opening on May 4, 2011.
Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (2010) is a poignant and poetically evocative portrait of a marriage. Green learned the story of Louisville hardware store clerk Leonard Wood when Wood’s house was condemned. A domestic maze of Surrealist proportions, Wood had been making additions to the house for years, hoping to create a healing machine for his wife, Mary, who was terminally ill with cancer. After she died, Wood continued his work as a means of communicating with Mary. Green, a multi-media artist and musician known for visually layered animations, recreated the entire house and surrounding buildings, adding imaginative, sculptural details, and cast the story as a full-length film. The resulting project — an homage to the transformative power of both love and art--combines film, installation, sculpture, and performance, and collapses boundaries between documentary and fiction, between biography and fantasy. As Rachel Saltz describes it in The New York Times, the film, “shot entirely on the full-scale town he built in his backyard, combines animation, stop-motion, and live-action in an ethereal opus to lovers and tinkerers everywhere.”

On view at LOT will be a selection of the town’s buildings, the Wood house, sculptures, and videos, as well as Green’s feature film. Says Alice Gray Stites, director of artwithoutwalls, “This multi-media epic truly began in Louisville, where Brent Green first uncovered the story of Mary and Leonard Wood, and then began his own creative journey towards the realization of Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. And as artwithoutwalls strives to collaborate with other innovative organizations, LOT is the ideal partner and venue for presenting Gravity in Louisville.”

Dima Strakovsky of LOT adds, “Collaboration is at the heart of Land of Tomorrow functions and Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then highlights this element of our programming.
It is a great pleasure to partner with artwithoutwalls on this amazing project. “

The exhibition will be on view from May 4 to June 17, 2011. A special reception with the artist is scheduled for May 13, 2011.

Brent Green

About the artist

Brent Green is a self-taught animated filmmaker and artist who lives and works in Cressona, PA. His films have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, MoMA, the Getty Center, the Kitchen, the Hammer Museum, the Rotterdam Film Festival, and a host of other venues across the US and Europe. Exhibitions of his work have been featured at numerous galleries and museums, including the Sculpture Center, Cleveland, CAM St Louis, Site Santa Fe, The Berkeley Art Museum, Arizona State University, Diverse Works, Houston, the Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York and many others.