Anaïs Duplan, Hope Ginsburg, Melody Jue, Jennifer Lange
Meditation Ocean (gallery guide)
Wexner Center for the Arts, 2023
Sarah Howard
"Sponge Exchange, Hope Ginsburg" (exhibition text)
University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, 2020
Denise Markonish
"Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder"
(excerpt from catalog essay)
MASS MoCA, 2016
pp. 50–51
Jennifer Lange
"Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy" (exhibition text)
THE BOX, Wexner Center for the Arts, 2016
Annie Dell'Aria
"Deep Breathing: Annie Dell'Aria on Meditation Ocean"
Artforum, May 2023
Pablo Helguera
"Reading Assignments: Books that artists study, reference, and base works on."
Beautiful Eccentrics
August 18, 2022
Jennifer Lange
Film/Video Studio Journals: Hope Ginsburg
In Practice, Wexner Center for the Arts
Fall 2021
Emma Colón
"5 Artists Bridging Communities Across Difference"
A Blade of Grass Magazine
March 28, 2019
Sydney Cologie and Brynne McGregor
"Wex Moments 2018: Film/Video Studio artist Hope Ginsburg"
(Q&A)
Wexner Center for the Arts
December 26, 2018
Tim Dodson
"Performative Diving Piece Featured at Festival Honoring the James
River"
Richmond Times-Dispatch
June 9, 2018
Jessica Lynne
"From Climate Change to Race Relations, Artists Respond to
Richmond, VA" (review)
Hyperallergic, 2015
Corina L. Apostol and Nato Thompson, Editors
"Making Another World Possible: 10 Creative Time Summits, 10 Global Issues, 100 Art Projects"
Routledge, 2020
pp. 277–278
Amanda Tobin Ripley and Julia Harth
Winter / Spring 2023 Learning Guide
Wexner Center for the Arts, 2023
"Meditation Ocean: How Climate Justice is Explored through Underwater Meditation"
Interview with Hope Ginsburg
Wexner Center for the Arts
June 2024 (Recorded in November 2022)
Land Dive Team: Amphibious James
Television Program is a Production of VPM
Producer/Director: Mason Mills
Producer/Field Director: Allison Benedict
September 22, 2019
Art and Education in the 21st Century
Panelists: John Brown-Executive Director, Windgate Foundation; Tom
Finkelpearl-Commissioner, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs; Hope
Ginsburg-Artist and Educator; Moderator: Geoffrey Cowan- President,
The Annenberg Foundation Trust
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 2014
Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy
An artist who explores the slippery boundary between art and everyday life, Hope Ginsburg is motivated by a natural curiosity about the world. Her practice finds form in experiences and events that often generate images, objects and physical spaces, which are, in turn, the source of further investigation. Ginsburg’s work is informed by the history of social practice artists and feminist artists such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Like Ukeles, Ginsburg’s work explores the transformative potential of interactions between artist and audience, using seemingly simple subjects (bees, sponges, the act of breathing) as frameworks for exploration and exchange, particularly between teacher and student. Over the past 10 years, with the modest sea sponge as a subject of her curiosity, Ginsburg created Sponge (2007–2015), a living and breathing ecosystem of workshops, classes, and exhibitions that explored various forms of learning and knowledge exchange. Like the sea sponge, Ginsburg’s “work” is porous and malleable, a flowing network with a lifespan that allows it to evolve through interaction and collaboration.
Ginsburg participated in the Wexner Center’s 2004 exhibition Work Ethic, and in 2015 she returned as an artist-in-residence in the Film/Video Studio to work on Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy, which is part of a larger project called Breathing on Land. Given the nature of her practice, it is no surprise that this video is a direct extension of the activities and research performed during the Sponge project. After years of studying the sponge and the ways in which its form and cycle symbolized an alternative approach to learning, Ginsburg finally had an opportunity to view her pedagogical muse in its natural habitat among the ocean reefs with a 2011 grant that gave her the opportunity to take scuba diving lessons.
The lessons themselves led to new curiosity about a very different system of absorption and filtration–human breathing. After some traditional experiences underwater, Ginsburg began contemplating the idea of breathing on land. Underwater, the assisted breathing offered something meditative–the weight of the gear and the suit, the sound of each inhalation and exhalation–and all of this was amplified on land. But meditation is associated with healing and introspection, and the need for assisted breathing on land is strange and ominous, something reserved for an epidemic, war, or an environmental disaster. As our planet hits record-breaking temperatures and ocean waters continue to rise, perhaps that environmental crisis isn’t so far away? And perhaps the healing properties of meditation and the focus on specific landscapes could affect the ecological health of the planet.
This new line of inquiry led to Breathing on Land, an ongoing project that has included group performances, photographs, and video. Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy is set on the famous shores of the Bay of Fundy, which are alternately engulfed and exposed twice daily by the highest rising tide in the world–waters there rise and fall up to 50 feet every six hours. A fitting landscape for the consideration of our rapidly changing environment, the video shows four divers lined up together in meditative focus. Their breathing offers a strange but rich soundscape as it shifts with the rising tide from hisses to gurgling bubbles. It’s as if the tide is being summoned by the divers themselves. But it also resists, knocking the seated divers about with is natural ebb and flow and buoyant properties. In the end the divers are submerged completely, engulfed by the water and yet a part of its endless cycle.
Jennifer Lange
"Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy" (exhibition text)
THE BOX, Wexner Center for the Arts, 2016