The Greene Fellowship Annual Exhibition

Two solo shows by Greene Fellows & Resident Artists Alex Branch & Phillip David Stearns.
Guest curated by George Bolster.

September 6-October 26, 2025

Opening reception: Saturday, September 6, 6-8pm

Artist talk: October 3, 6-7:30pm

About the 2025 Greene Fellowship Exhibition

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.

About Aesthetic Impermanence

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.

About Artificial Geologies

Stearns’ work in Artificial Geologies excavates research methodologies utilized in geology through employing the discipline’s visual vocabulary. His application of artificial tectonic forces turns a multitude of waste products into rocks and core samples representing igneous and sedimentary forms. 

Stearns confronts us with facts, they are simultaneously beautiful and unpleasant, and while the artist intends us to face current dilemmas such as poisoning in packaging and the wastefulness of takeaway culture, he couches these problems in compellingly attractive sculptures such as Plasticene Artifact 2025 05 10, and photographic prints Plasticene Material Study 5 Split Full Scan, 2025. Through his composition of these forms, he redeems them from what they – as separate elements signified, essentially trash. 

There is something shocking about his cataloging in the form of lists of the materials, which make up these sculptures, and each one confronts viewers with their own culpability, because biological weathering cannot break down these materials. This further complicates the interpretation of the works, as with any body of human knowledge, science has been a double edged sword that has placed us in a catch 22 situation. 

Its development of plastics through chemistry has caused a massive environmental crisis, but we also have to place trust in it because it has also allowed us to see – through studies in geology and other branches – the damage humans have done and continue to do through the Anthropocenic epoch. 

While there is hopelessness in the depiction of our current relationship to the world, there is profound hope in the work of Alex Branch and Phillip Stearns, particularly in making us embody reality, if we can embrace that then we can then set about changing it.

Artist Talk

Join us at RedLine on Friday, October 3, from 6-7:30pm for an artist talk with 2025 Greene Fellows Alex Branch and Phillip Stearns.

About the Guest Curator

George Bolster is currently Curator at the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. From 2014 to 2020, he served as part of the Foundation’s curatorial team and was Director of Programs and External Affairs. Recent exhibitions he co-organized at The 8th Floor gallery include Romance Regret and Regeneration in Landscape, (2025), Geographic Bodies by Joiri Minaya (2025), Narrative Obsession in the Post-Colonial Psyche, (2024), Reality Reframed: Recent Works by Todd Gray (2024), Bang Geul Han: Land of Tenderness (2023), Articulating Activism: Works from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Private Collection (2022), Kindred Solidarities: Queer Community and Chosen Families (2021), and To Cast Too Bold A Shadow (2021).

Previously, he worked at the Reversible Destiny Foundation as editor on Madeline Gins’ final book, and worked on her final architectural project, commissioned by Comme des Garçons at Dover St. Market, NYC. Bolster worked as an archivist on Shusaku Arakawa’s estate, and before that on those of artists Ray Johnson and May Wilson. 

He has curated numerous independent projects, including Tulca in Galway, Ireland; Urban Gothic at Dilston Grove, London, UK; Quartair Contemporary Art Initiatives, the Hague, Netherlands; and Multiplicity at Fota House, Cork, Ireland; Market Gallery, Monaghan, Ireland; and Context Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland. In addition to working on numerous exhibitions, he co-edited the publications Elia Alba: The Supper Club (2019) and An Incomplete Archive of Activist Art (2022), both published by Hirmer Verlag. In 2021 Bolster contributed an essay on Allan Kaprow to the book XVIII – Stories of TULCA (2021) and writes for The 8th Floor gallery program.

About The Greene Fellowship

The Greene Fellowship was formed in 2021 by Alexander S. Blume and Hannah Agosta to support inspired individuals and honor the memory of Brad Greene.

The Greene Fellowship supports working artists in the Denver Metro/Boulder area to develop their careers into financially self-sustaining pursuits.

The program believes that the world benefits and heals from people pursuing their passions with ambitious and inspiring visions combined with practical strategies towards building success and financial independence.