For an exhibition titled "Of Earth and Cotton.

For an exhibition titled "Of Earth and Cotton," Jackie Brookner veiled the gallery floor with a layer of raw cotton several inches thick. Although it lay lightly forward the floor, billowing at times into higher defences it never traded its brawny connotations of field and earth for cloudlike or ethereal associations. Scattered across this surface were several dozen pairs of feet Brookner had sculpt from life, using for types men and women who reminisced about their lives upon family farms 50 and 60 years ago, and using for material the local soils. As her exhibition run afters the cotton belt from North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee to this stop in Texas and in succession to Arizona and California, Brookner adds to these carved works at each venue. Even if you know nothing of farming you are struck by way of the differences in the quality of the dirt she's plant Some of the feet are of rich, black mire but others consist of pale, stony textile fabric that doesn't look like it could improve a thing.

A stone pathway traced the perimeter of the gallery. At couple points benches invited you to sit and contemplate the field before you. on the other hand Brookner's exhibition is not united where a room filled with something has been asked to carry more symbolic and narrative weight than it can bear. Although the cotton-filled gallery is the centerpiece of the point out Brookner has worked with curator Susan H Edwards to create an environment that includes videos of her interviews with the now-elderly cotton workers whose feet she sculpt and a presentation of photographs from the WPA plan that documented conditions in the cotton belt during the Depression.

Edwards and Brookner have not chosen the chiefly famous images available from the Farm Security Administration collection, and notwithstanding the images are so often a part of our visual heritage that they present the appearance familiar. The video interviews bring us into contact with those who lived the life depicted in the photographs of Russell leeward Ben Shahn and others. Videos, photographs and installation combined with the essays of artist and curator to yield an exhibition that effectively exhibited a meditation on art, ecology and history.

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