MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
August 28, 2023
This week we recognize Eve Andrée Laramée, and her forty-five year practice engaging the alchemical, as a nuclear arms activist and agit-prop eco-art instigator.
River of Stone, 1989 (above) made of copper, water, salt, glass, and mica, was included in "Revered Earth" in 1991, a traveling exhibition initiated by the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The piece is a later work from Laramée's evaporation pool series, officially starting with "Venusian Lagoons," shown at the Albuquerque Museum in a solo exhibition with catalogue, in 1983. Comprised of several large evaporation ponds containing salt, water, copper and iron, her lagoons were inspired by early experiments she made while living in the San Francisco Bay Area during graduate school at SFAI in 1978-1980. The conceptual basis for this time-based series was alchemical processes, as well as being influenced by travertine deposits that form in mineral-rich hot springs, highlighting natural and geological/mineralogical phenomena.
Parks on Trucks: Project for the City of Aachen, Germany, 1999 (above) consisted of a series of parks on a fleet of three large, commercial, flat-bed trucks which circulated through the city and were parked in different places on a weekly basis. Parks represent some of the most "natural" elements in our landscapes, yet they are designed and cultivated, controlled and aestheticized using methods that are clearly "unnatural" and sometimes extremely so. Cultures tend to see parks as "sacred spaces," luxurious romanticization and fetishizations of nature that are only possible because modern industrial economies buffer us from the worst of nature's hazards and discomforts. This security and comfort, however, frequently imposes high environmental costs that make it necessary to "rescue" nature from culture by designating and producing parks. Placing parks on trucks brings these seeming contradictions together for mutual consideration in a simultaneously humorous, sardonic, radical, and reverential gesture. One truck was cultivated with plants with medicinal and poisonous properties, a play on the phrase, "The Gift of Nature" as the word "gift" in German means poison. A second truck (above), the “Carbon Balance” truck was planted with a topiary garden representing transformed nature, it was driven only as far as it polluted the air and cleaned it at the same rate per research by a biogeographer. A third was planted with the staple crop, corn.
Sugar Mud (Hudson River Project), 2003 (above) was installed in the drawing room of a Gilded Age mansion in Riverdale, New York, Wave Hill, and consisted of a room-sized mound of golden-colored sugar that referenced two local issues. One was the golden hue associated with the historic Hudson River School of painters and the accumulated toxic sediment from the sugar factory sludge located on the shore of the Hudson River. Collaborating with environmental scientists, Laramée created Sediment Profile Imagery using benthic disturbance mapping of the river bottom documenting the channels where 80,000 tons of sludge were dredged and relocated to the ocean floor.
Halfway to Invisible (2009) was an installation commissioned by Emory University, an affiliate of the Center for Disease Control, focused on epidemiological and genetic issues in relation to uranium mining. More than 225,000,000 tons of uranium ore was mined by Native American laborers, including the Laguna, Navajo, Zuni, Southern Ute, Ute Mountain, Hopi, and Acoma cultures. These workers were poorly paid, and seldom informed of the dangers of working with uranium or given appropriate protective gear. Epidemiologic studies of the workers and their families show increased incidents of radiation-induced cancers, miscarriages, and birth defects. Field trips to the Jackpile Uranium Mine at Laguna Pueblo, meetings with retired uranium miners, hydro-geologists and remediation engineers informed the questions raised by the work: Is our atomic legacy producing genotoxic effects in indigenous human populations? If so, what is the extent of DNA damage, and how might this affect these populations in the future?
NukeNOtes, 2013-ongoing (below) is a social sculpture project bringing environmental art and research to non-art audiences in the form of “alternative fact sheets,” or National Park brochures, as a vehicle to expand understanding, change perception and support engagement around public lands and adjacent nuclear legacy sites. The brochures draw attention to the use, misuse and commodification of our public lands by activities that produce serious environmental and health impacts such as uranium mining and milling, research, development and production of nuclear weapons, project engages this legacy. 108 of these sites exist in 38 states, several adjoining National Parks and public lands. They are former mining, milling, manufacturing and testing sites for the U.S. nuclear weapons production operations during WWII and the Cold War. As climate change occurs and vulnerability spectrum's shift these sites and the people surrounding them, including many indigenous populations are at increased risk. Sites include Atlas Uranium Mill/Arches National Park, Yucca Mountain/Death Valley National Park, among others.
Eve Andrée Laramée is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working at the confluence of art and science. She is a Professor of the Department of Art at Pace University. and the Director of the Dyson Center for the Arts, Society & Ecology. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her artwork has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Exhibitions include at the Venice Biennale, Mass MOCA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; among other institutions. Her work is included in the collections of the MacArthur Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, and in numerous other public and private collections. Laramée has received two grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, an Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, two fellowships from the New York Foundation for Arts and grants from the Mid-Atlantic States Arts Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Museum Sculptor-in-Residence Program. Her work has been written about by art historians and art critics in in numerous books and journals including Artforum, Art in America, ArtNews, the New York Times, CAA Art Journal, among others. Laramée also writes about art and environmental issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Andree_Laramee
Images: ©Eve Andrée Laramée, River of Stone, 1989, copper, water, salt, glass, and mica, first exhibited at the New Museum in 1989, for the exhibition Strange Attractors: Signs of Chaos, and included inRevered Earth, a traveling exhibition curated by Dominique Mazeaud, with additional text and insights by Suzi Gablik, shown at Contemporary Arts Museum (TX), The Pratt Institute (NY), Atlanta College of Art with Nexus Contemporary Art Center (GA), University of Arizona Museum of Art, Blue Star Art Space (TX) The Mint Museum (NC), and concluded at the Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe (NM), 1990-1991, catalogue; Parks on Trucks: Carbon Balance Truck Project for the City of Aachen, Germany, 1999, truck, topiary, soil, and gravel, commissioned by the Ludwig Forum Museum, included in the exhibition Natural Reality: Artistic Positions between Nature and Culture, curated by Heike Strelow; Sugar Mud (Hudson River Project), 2003, crystalized yellow sugar, wood, digital photographs, lighting gels, 16.5 x 35 x 6.5 feet, exhibited at Wavehill, Riverdale, Bronx, New York, curated by Jennifer McGregor; Halfway to Invisible, 2009, kinetic sculpture, video, video projection, 60 lightboxes with transparencies, Cold War artifacts, archive of documents, photographs, ambient soundscape; Atlas Uranium Mill, from NukeNotes series, 2013-ongoing, activist National Parks brochures; below, portrait of the artist.
