"encounter"

With Her Exhibit 'Poetic Ecologies,' Painter Cameron Davis Explores Radical Aliveness

By Pamela Polston 

Published March 1, 2023 at 10:00 a.m. for www.sevendayssvt.com

Cameron Davis' paintings simultaneously convey vastness and intimacy. Her works are loosely tethered to botany, yet the recognizable shapes of petals and leaves could be seen as spirit guides to a less understood but deeply immersive realm. Call it the web of life. Or call it, as Davis does, "poetic ecologies."

That's the title of her entrancing solo exhibition at the Vermont Supreme Court Gallery in Montpelier; the phrase, which Davis borrowed from German biologist and writer Andreas Weber, hints at her existential engagement with nature. Her goal is not simply to observe and replicate earthly elements on canvas; rather, Davis investigates what it means to be in an empathic relationship with the Earth.

"My paintings are fundamentally an act of sense making," her artist statement begins. "I have been circling experiences of presence in nature — including questions of what is nature — within the formal language of painting for 40 years."

"At a perceptual level, connectivity is a form of activism." Cameron Davis

Davis recently retired after teaching for 34 years in the University of Vermont art department and is currently on sabbatical. And she's putting in time at the easel: Many of the paintings in her exhibit are quite new.

Most of the 17 acrylic works in the courthouse gallery are large — particularly several diptychs. "Encounter," for example, is 72 by 60 inches. Several ghostly magnolia blossoms dominate the left panel; the right contains a thicket of murkier plant shapes and colors. Gestural dabs of bright turquoise and sherbet orange, perhaps liberated petals, seem to leap from the foreground.

In the 80-by-60-inch "Entanglements With Spare Intensities," vivid turquoise blossoms seem to dance atop a bramble of other plant patterns, while in the center of the diptych, areas of cavernous black pull the eye deeper.

Davis' skilled application of contrasting hues and translucency gives her canvases remarkable dimensionality. Even the denser compositions have an ethereal inner glow, beckoning like a secret.

To create literal layers on the canvas, Davis uses a mix of other techniques, including tracing projections, laying down physical plants that leave impressions when removed, and pouring and manipulating paint. Some of the paintings subtly shimmer, as if sprinkled with fairy dust. Alas, the source is less chimerical: "It's watered-down gold paint," the artist said.

"Magnolia Memorial I"

Davis compared the elements in her paintings to "different kinds of languages — spontaneous, intuitive, referential, photographic, impressionistic," she said. "I'm really interested in what happens mashing up these different vocabularies. How do you make those work? That's where the newness happens."

Her artistic process creates multiple spaces — perhaps multiple realities — within a single painting. The visual experience is both unsettling and enticing, like coming upon a portal to a parallel universe. "I like that space shifting, which for me also corresponds to time shifts," Davis said. "I like that fracture, or disjunction of time and space."

In a wide-ranging phone conversation, Davis shared ideas about coexistence with the Earth, the practice of awe and why painting is like life.

There's a lot to unpack in your artist statement. You write that you've been "circling experiences of presence in nature..." Do you mean human presence?

I'm exploring the subjective nature of nature, and that includes humans, but also that there is presence in liveness.

What is your formal language in painting?

What I'm doing is using line and color and mark, surface, space. The paintings have imagery, or subject matter, that might refer to plant patterns, but I also think the process itself reveals how nature works. Multiple layers of communication happen.

The [painting] process is improvisational, so the references to the patterns almost could be an equivalent to laying down a melodic line and then responding to it. Contrast, saturation of color, detail, three-dimensionality — they have a kind of pace. What you notice more, or less, that's where it starts to feel musical. Those coherent moments feel emergent.

Working musically, you lay down a track. But the tracks aren't separate; they're talking to each other. Accidents happen, relationships that you hadn't noticed. It's a corollary to how life works, how evolution works.

"Magnolia Memorial"

Continue reading interview here

The exhibition is up through March 31, 2023 at the Vermont Supreme Court Gallery, more information here

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

March 6, 2023

This week we recognize  Minoosh Zomorodinia Minoosh Zomorodinia, and her   almost twenty-year practice as a photographer and interdisciplinary artist.

"Informed by my cultural background, religion, and politics, my work investigates the concept of “Self,” specifically how it relates to the environment. Inspired by nature, I borrow from rituals including walking, sometimes infusing humor. I integrate contradictory concepts into pieces that visualize struggles of the “self” by inserting my body into these moments of time and space. Recently I employed walking as a catalyst for my sculptures, which reference nomadic lifestyles, as well as colonialism. By tracking my paths using technology, I claim the ownership of the land, while representing a changed perception in the digital age and addressing transformation of memories into actual physical space absurdly." 

click images for more info

"Over several years I have referenced the natural elements in my work. The three channel video titled Resist: Air, Water, Earth, 2014 (above) is an ongoing project sometimes displayed as a photograph and sometimes as a video. I have been using water, air and earth as a metaphor of resistance, to demonstrate the challenges of daily life and global cultural conflicts. In the two side videos, I documented an ice cylinder using water from the San Francisco Bay, melting in different locations. In the middle screen, I use my body wearing a Chador (a traditional garment that devout Muslim women wear to cover the head and body). I hold it tightly so the wind or water don’t remove it while I'm walking backwards, entering the ocean. The video demands the viewer to watch the struggle, navigating my body with the camera, also while not paying attention to me." (19:07 mins)

"Feelings produce different psychological states within the human being. Sensation (above) is the result from the air stimulation at different sites. I search for the self in nature while letting the wind touch the mylar to curve the shape of my body. I’m interested in the connection between my body and the landscape to express my feelings. My body merges with the landscape and the emergency blanket to integrate within the sky. Although the sense of touch is experienced through the lens it identifies resistance. The natural environment is a source of inspiration for me. Over the years, in search of the self in nature, I have attempted to create work using natural elements as material to explore connections between my body and landscape. In Sensation, for the first time the wind became an intuitive collaborator during a walk at the Djerassi Resident Artists site. I let the wind’s force define the shape of my body through an emergency blanket, a material that represents heat and protection for refugees in times of crisis. The video camera, the only witness to my actions, documents my struggles with the air that covers my entire body, making its force visible, caressing my form, emphasizing every movement and act of resistance. In attempts to merge my body with the landscape that surrounds me, the force of the wind is sometimes the winner. Sensation has been performed and documented at different sites, including the Marin Headlands and Talaghan, located in the Northeast of my hometown, Tehran."

During the pandemic, Zomorodinia started to paint from the digital record of places that she physically experienced. In this series, Map of Walking, 2020 (above) she references archiving memory in space and time based on data saved through satellite maps. The gold leaf covers her physical movements in the place and addresses labor and the value of time and land. These paintings are from her residency at Recology AIR program, San Francisco, where she recorded her motions and time while scavenging trash from the dump to make art for her final exhibition. "I am interested in how technology forms memory through digital archiving, transforming invisible routes that exist as a memory into actual objects in abstract form. Is there any limitation?"

In her most recent series, Made Lands, 2021 (below) Zomorodinia re-forms and reshapes borders to reference historical monuments to labor and the memories of various localities, as well as representing topography in the digital age. The abstracted natural imagery is printed on leftover material with textures from the actual location. The printed images transform our perceptions of the natural environment in the new media age. She is interested in how technology forms memory through digital archiving, transforming invisible routes that exist as a memory into actual objects in abstract form. She asks, "How will the history of a place exist in the future?"

Minoosh Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist who makes visible the emotional and psychological reflections of her mind's eye inspired by nature and her environment. She employs walking as a catalyst to reference the power of technology as a colonial structure while negotiating boundaries of land. Her strollings sometimes reimagine our relationships between nature, land, and technology, while addressing the transformation of memories into actual physical space absurdly. Zomorodinia has received several awards, residences, and grants including the Kala Media Fellowship Award, Headlands Center for the Arts, Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists' Residency, Djerassi Residency, Recology Artist Residency, the Alternative Exposure Award, and California Art Council Grants. She has exhibited locally and internationally at Asian Art Museum San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission, Berkeley Art Center, Pori Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, ProARTS, Untitled Art Fair Miami and many more. Her work has been featured in the SF Chronicle, Hyperallergic, SFWeekly, KQED and many other media outlets. She earned her MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute, and holds a Masters degree in Graphic Design and BA in Photography from Azad University in Tehran. She currently lives and works in the Bay Area.   rahelehzomorodinia.com

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Minoosh Zomorodinia, Faces of God series 2008, images primarily shot in Iran; Resist: Air, Water, Earth, 2014; Sensation III, 2016-ongoing, silver metallic print, 8 x 11 inches;Map of Walking, 2020, made during the pandemic while at Recology AIR, San Francisco, California; Made Lands, 2021, print on shaped aluminum, various sizes, exhibited at Local Language, Oakland, California; Selfie portrait by the artist.

The ecoartspace March 2023 e-Newsletter for subscribers is here

Artist during field research in desert

Retracing the Paths of the Planet:
Katrina Bello’s process, reflections, and intimacy with the world through drawing

Interview by Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein

Katrina Bello’s artwork begins far outside the walls of her studio. She revisits physical, intellectual, and emotional landscapes through a touching example of experiential fieldwork. Combined with informed philosophical questions and insights and an in-depth understanding of the physical world and its textures, she uses drawing as an intermediary between herself and this world. Everything from the physicality of her process to her choice of scale and subject are intentional and steeped in perception. She is a fantastic example of an artist whose work is an interwoven extension of her very sense of being.

From “Drawing as a Noun, Drawing as a Verb”, Modeka Art, Phillipines, 2021

Katrina, in your work, you create hyper-realistic surveys of the natural world, often of water, tree bark, and rocks. What is it about your process that helps create this intimate connection between yourself and your subject?  

I think the textures in my work result from my studio process that has a heavy involvement with the sense of touch. Part of my work process is hiking and photographing for references for the drawings; during this activity I am constantly touching the things I encounter so I can observe them closely and see the details of the tree bark, the rocks, the water, and the desert canyon walls.

The role that touch plays in my work was something I did not examine until it was pointed out to me by the graduate school director at MICA. Her name is Zlata Baum and she recommended I read a particular text by Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa titled “Eyes of The Skin: Architecture and The Senses”. The text shed light on what I felt I was doing. In the text, Pallasmaa mentions touch as the “mother of the senses.” In the book’s introduction, he wrote: “Touch is the sensory mode that integrates our experience of the world with ourselves…My body is truly the navel of my world, not in the sense of the viewing point of the central perspective, but as the very locus of reference, memory, imagination and integration.”

More than simply finding references for my work, it is my process of knowing and having a deeper connection to the place that makes it unique. In this intimate process I become aware of the textures of things. Even in my studio process, while drawing, touch also plays a large role. For example, my drawings are made with soft pastels that I crush into a powder, which I then apply on the paper with my hands rubbing the powder vigorously with my palms on the papers surface and using my fingertips to make details.   

From “40,000 Tons”, Caldwell University, New Jersey, 2023

More than simply finding references for my work, it is my process of knowing and having a deeper connection to the place that makes it unique.

Your process makes sense to me and how I experience your work. When I look at your work, it brings me an incredible stillness; a similar feeling that I have when, lost deep in thought. I find myself sitting peacefully as time flows freely past me. There has also been a lot of discussion in my circles about the histories and identities that materials and objects themselves hold. What do you consider the relationship between material, identity, and experience?

I am very grateful when my work evokes a sense of stillness in someone. Stillness is not a quality that I intentionally work to create, but because the work takes a great amount of time to execute. The process of making the small details, especially the large drawings, often necessitates that I am sitting and standing still for hours. Perhaps these are somehow embedded and revealed in the work. I find the relationship between material, identity and experience as something that is forged, informed, and understood through lived experience and knowledge. One of the questions that had occupied my thoughts in my studio practice was “how do I know what I know” and how my work is forged by what I know. A few years ago, I came across a text that lists the main sources of knowledge: memory, senses, rational thought, testimony of others, and revelation.

Time is also an idea that occupies my thoughts when I am working, so perhaps that also permeates the work as well. I think of the contradiction between the human experience of time through minutes and years, while rocks and mountains experience time in epochs and eons. And when I observe the tiny lines that look like drawings in the cracks and fissures in tree bark and rocks, I feel a sense of wonder for the length of time during which such lines developed. This stands in contradiction to the speed through which I make a line with my pencil on the paper. I am confounded by the seeming stillness of these linear patterns found in nature, which are signs of an ongoing yet barely perceptible movement and transformation that is taking place. Therefore, when I am in my studio making a line drawing that takes months to almost a whole year to execute, I feel like I am retracing or reenacting the slow geologic time that these lines in nature occurred.  

Artist in studio during artist residency at Brush Creek Founation, Saratoga, Wyoming, 2018

…when I am in my studio making a line drawing that takes months to almost a whole year to execute, I feel like I am retracing or reenacting the slow geologic time that these lines in nature occurred.  

And, those lines are compositionally fascinating as well! Though your work is based in intensive observation, your compositions sit at the intersection of realism and abstraction. The pieces I have seen, interface and permeate between topics of artistic materialness, and the actual physical patterns of the world. Is there a correlation for you between abstract reflection and a literal understanding of the landscapes we inhabit?

I think of abstraction in the planning and composition of my drawings. At the same time, when I am executing the drawings, I am constantly thinking of realism when it comes to the details of the rocks, tree bark, and textures of the landscapes that these subjects are part of. My engagement with nature often entails up-close observation. And when I do so, I often find what appears like miniature terrains on the surfaces of rocks and tree bark. I am fascinated by how they seem alien, otherworldly, and remote.

I am more interested in the desire to trace the lines of these otherworldly forms, and draw them as they appear, rather than invest in the desire to reinvent them.  This “otherness” in things that is manifested in their surfaces and patterns is an idea that I became interested in after I came across a 2007 lecture on the works by Gilles Deleuze of philosopher Manuel de Landa at the European Graduate School. In the lecture, de Landa spoke of Deleuze’s studies on nonhuman expressivity. He gave examples such as crystals, rock striations and geological events like volcanic explosions and tectonic plate movements that dramatically change our landscape in very slow times scales; these are all part of the idea that expressivity is not solely possessed by humans, and that even inorganic things have the capacity to express their identity through their forms. De Landa further explains that for Deleuze, if we focus only on things that are human and the creations by humans, we lose sense of our “otherness” which refers to the nonhuman.

These ideas about nonhuman expressivity and otherness were such significant revelations for me. It made me reexamine how I perceive the natural world and how to represent it in my work, especially in my drawings. It taught me to “re-see” forms in nature as marks, paths, and imprints of purposeful processes that lead to their construction.  It led me to reconsider working with realism, literal representations and understandings of the landscapes we inhabit. 

Salix, 2017, charcoal and pastel on paper, 60 x 92 inches

… even inorganic things have the capacity to express their identity through their forms.

I love how considerate you are of perception relating to your subject. And you express this very intentionally through your formatting. You are very considerate when choosing the scale of your artworks, presenting either monumental 5 ft x 8ft or delicate and intimate 5 in x 8 in pieces. How did you decide to choose specifically these scales? What is it about these two extremes that you want to emphasize to your audience?  

I am interested in these extremes in scale as reflections on the sense of scale that is implied in the subjects of the works themselves. Because my subjects are nature, the environment, migration, and my memories and experiences of landscapes that I have physically encountered. I often feel that there’s an overwhelming sense of boundlessness in these subjects- that they are ungraspable; especially when it comes to memory. Just as a desert or body of water can feel vast and enormous, so do the scale of environmental issues that we are currently dealing with such as global warming, ocean pollution, deforestation, and more.

 At the same time, I also make the opposite: very small things that are intended to communicate intimacy and fragility. When I make very small drawings based on oceans and landscapes that can fit in the palm of one’s hands. It is intended to communicate the sense that it is fragile, precious and something to care for. Therefore, I count on size and scale to insist on themes that have an urgency (such as the ones relating to the environment) within the subject of the work. 

Hawak/Hold: Passamaquoddy Bay, 2019, still image from video animation

I often feel that there’s an overwhelming sense of boundlessness in these subjects that they are ungraspable; especially when it comes to memory.

You mentioned a combination of literal physical reflection and personal experience. From what I understand, the topics you choose to depict are related to your own migration story. What was it about your own migration that inspired this reflective and structured practice?

I feel that my experience of the landscapes here in the United States is through the lens or spirit of exploration, with a little bit of longing for the remembered landscapes of my native country. The more I live here, in my adopted country, the more it seems like my memories of my migration experience are embedded in the work. When I migrated to the United States, it was unexpected, and I was not prepared to leave my native country. I had an intensely strong connection to the landscapes of the city of my birth, which is located in the southern part of the Philippines. The tropical coastal city I was born in lies at the foot of the largest volcano in the country that is presumably extinct, and the city has a beach with black sand made from eroded volcanic material. My siblings and I spent our youth mostly exploring the tropical outdoors, especially this black sand beach and a sea that is darkened by that sand. 

Immensity (Smudge), 2019, charcoal and pastel on paper, 60 x 37 inches

As my memories of this landscape begin to fade as I get older and live longer here in the United States, I notice that my work begins to have a sense of that landscape more and more; my drawing works became larger, more detailed, and with color resembling the color of the dark sand. Perhaps this development of my work is attributed to longing and nostalgia.

At the same time, the work is made with an intense interest and fascination with the landscapes of my adopted country. I am especially interested in exploring tree species that are so different from those in the Philippines, and mountains and deserts that I have never seen until coming into the United States.

My landscape exploration here in the United States started in New Jersey. This was the second state I lived in here; New York was where I first lived when I migrated. I was first interested in the trees near where I lived and often photographed and observed them through the years. From there, I started becoming interested in rocks, trees, ocean waters, and mountains in places I traveled to as a tourist and as an artist-in-residence. 

My drawing works became larger, more detailed, and with color resembling the color of the dark sand (of my birth landscape). Perhaps this development of my work is attributed to longing and nostalgia.

I can see a parallel to your process with charcoal dust in your hands, the volcanic soil, new landscapes, and the subject of your new work. Your recent exhibition “40,000 Tons” at the Mueller Gallery at Caldwell University, expanded your earthbound topics to astrological ones. “40,000 Tons” is the amount of stardust that falls to earth each year, correct? What has inspired you to focus on stardust and abiogenesis (the origin of evolutionary life on Earth)?

Correct. According to a 2015 feature in National Geographic, that is the volume of cosmic dust that falls on Earth annually from space. My interest in looking into space subjects emerged during the lockdown during the early part of the pandemic in 2020 when I was unable to travel to the Nevada desert where I intended to photograph and observe rocks for a series of drawings and videos. Before the pandemic, the objects and landscapes referenced for my work were things and places I had physically visited, observed, and photographed repeatedly through several years. But when the pandemic started, I had to find ways to make up for my inability to travel.

Then, in May 2020, the world was captivated by the first launch of NASA astronauts into space by SpaceX.  During those days around the launch, it felt as if the whole world stood still and was looking upwards to the skies and outside of Earth. It was for me a realization of how the entirety of my studio practice was focused on mostly looking into the natural world that is limited to Earth, even though I was thinking of vastness.

 It was for me the beginning of thinking of the exponentially rich, expansive and vast resource of matter, time and astronomical events outside of Earth. And when I began to work with this new resource, my research reached a point of learning about the formation of how the planet, and everything in it, even the thoughts and emotions we feel, emerged from the matter that comes from space. I was fixated with the volume of this matter - this 40,000 tons of cosmic material that falls annually. So, when I am working with drawings using soft pastel powder and rubbing these pigments with my hands on a five by eight foot expanse of paper, sometimes I feel like I am retracing the path that cosmic dust is traveling on the planet.

Sometimes I feel like I am retracing the path that the cosmic dust is traveling on the planet. 

Thank you, Katrina, for a truly perceptive interview. You have given me a lot to think about and broadened my perspective on the world. 

40,000 Tons has been extend at the Mueller Gallery until March 7 here

Pam Longobardi amid a giant heap of fishing gear that she and volunteers from the Hawaii Wildlife Fund collected in 2008. David Rothstein, CC BY-ND

The Conversation, published February 14, 2023

I am obsessed with plastic objects. I harvest them from the ocean for the stories they hold and to mitigate their ability to harm. Each object has the potential to be a message from the sea – a poem, a cipher, a metaphor, a warning.

My work collecting and photographing ocean plastic and turning it into art began with an epiphany in 2005, on a far-flung beach at the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii. At the edge of a black lava beach pounded by surf, I encountered multitudes upon multitudes of plastic objects that the angry ocean was vomiting onto the rocky shore.

I could see that somehow, impossibly, humans had permeated the ocean with plastic waste. Its alien presence was so enormous that it had reached this most isolated point of land in the immense Pacific Ocean. I felt I was witness to an unspeakable crime against nature, and needed to document it and bring back evidence.

I began cleaning the beach, hauling away weathered and misshapen plastic debris – known and unknown objects, hidden parts of a world of things I had never seen before, and enormous whalelike colored entanglements of nets and ropes.

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MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

February 27, 2023

This week we recognize Gene A. Felice II  Gene A. Felice II, and his twenty year hybrid practice focused on collaboration at the intersection of nature and technology.

FLOW, 2017, (above) was a multi-media evening of water themed light and projection during the annual Spring tour of the Thomas Hill Standpipe, a 1.5 million gallon water storage for fire fighting, situated in downtown Bangor, Maine. Sound and moving imagery inspired by the rich history and daily functions of this unique riveted wrought iron tank with a wood frame jacket, at 50 feet high and 75 feet in diameter, represents the incredible diversity of life that depends on water ecosystems. Collaborators on the work included faculty and students from The Coaction Lab at the University of Maine, in partnership with the Intermedia MFA program, the New Media Department, and the Bangor Water District.

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Visitors to Oceanic Scales, 2015 - ongoing, (above) explore their role in maintaining a stable ocean ecology through a multi-sensory, interactive art and science puzzle inspired by the microorganisms of the sea. Light, scent, sound and touch inspire new ways of thinking about ocean health while exploring the visualization and contextualization of ocean sensor data into a creative digital output, streamed from the MBARI Elkhorn Slough sensor array API located in the Monterey bay on the California central coast.

Above is an early 3D test print from a collaboration with Columban de Vargas, Research Director at the CNRS France, and leader of the EPEP – Evolution of Pelagic Ecosystems & Protists – team at the Station Biologique de Roscoff. Felice has been taking high resolution 3D scans of microscopic phytoplankton, hollowing them and creating scientific manipulative that can be opened so that students can examine their interior cellular components. The blue prints are early tests done on my Ultimaker 2 PLA filament based printer, printed at 60 microns resolution. The clear prints were done on our new Form Labs Form 1 SLA printer at the IMRC, with a much higher 25 micron resolution and very nice transparency / durability factors. The next steps are to print the interior components and the other half of the outer shell, as well as finalizing connector mechanisms that allow the two halves to join together and pull apart when needed. 

Ebb & Flow, 2019, (above) was a three week summer research and performance trip taken with the Mobile Coaction Lab (MCL) from Wilmington, North Carolina to Santa Barbara, California and points between.The Labcollects, visualizes and sonifies local water data and shares it through outdoor, multi-media, video projection mapping and light and sound based digital storytelling events. MCL at the University of North Carolina Wilmington together with Open Lab Research at the University of California Santa Cruz, collaborated with Maine artist and wooden boat builder, Reed Hayden at the University of Maine to create the lab, constructed using a combination of wooden boat building and digital fabrication techniques, designed to house an array of art and science tools.

The exhibition titled CONFLUENCE (below) was presented at the Cameron Art Museum in 2021, by the collaborative Algae Society, which Felice co-founded with Jennifer Parker at UCSC / Openlab that has several members, both artists and scientists. The works showcased a variety of media formats, time & magnification scales, and creative approaches to being with algae as a multi-sensory art & science (media art & culture) experience. Included were growing algal portraits in a Bio Art lab, VR worldmaking experiences, biodegradable 3D printed sculptures, immersive video & sound works, seaweed pressings, 19th century botanical illustrations, a floating island ecosystem, and more. Visitors of all ages were invited to get to know algae, from the microscopic scales of phytoplankton – to the giant kelp of the Pacific Northwest. The exhibition is currently available to travel. 

Gene A. Felice II           bridges his creative practice across art, science, education and design, developing a sustainable network of innovation, living systems, and emerging technologies. His hybrid practice grows at the intersection of nature and technology, developing coactive systems as arts science research. His interdependent systems of hardware and software translate research into interactive, multi-sensory puzzles, exploring both passive and active modes of interaction, providing multiple ways for the audience to engage with the work. Video and animated imagery displayed via projection mapping / shared VR, transform two-dimensional surfaces into three-dimensional storytelling systems. Throughout his creative process, emerging technologies such as 3D printing, laser cutting & CNC milling hybridize with older methods such as wood fabrication, lost wax bronze casting, ceramics, glass casting and more. While keeping site specific histories in mind, he achieves confluence by merging these varied passions into a system of creative collaboration. Felice is an assistant professor in Digital Art within the department of Art & Art History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where he is developing the Coaction Lab for interdisciplinary collaboration. His work has been featured nationally at the Cameron Art Museum, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, internationally at Sussex University in the UK, at ISEA Hong Kong and as a 2018 American Arts Incubator / State Dept. funded exchange artist based in Alexandria Egypt. genefelice.com

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Gene Felice, FLOW, 2017 - ongoing,multi-media evening of water themed light and projection, Bangor, Maine, and following at Fort Knox Intercreate International SCANZ Biennial, and in Wilmington, North Carolina as FlowILM for Earth Day 2019-2023; Oceanic Scales, 2015 - ongoing, California Academy of Sciences & Alterspace in San Francisco; high resolution 3D scans of microscopic phytoplankton in development; Ebb and Flow, 2019, cross country research excursion with the Mobile Coaction lab (MCL), 2017 - ongoing; CONFLUENCE, 2021, exhibition at the Cameron Art Museum, North Carolina; portrait of the artist.

Trees, Humanity, and Reaching for the Light

Feb 14th 2023

BY Rebecca Senf for meansandmatters.bankofthewest.com

One day in 1981, photographer David Paul Bayles was rushing through Santa Barbara, California, to pick up film for a job when he noticed a tree.

Tree and Three Windows, 1981, from the series Urban Forest
Santa Barbara, CA

The recent photography graduate from Brooks Institute of Photography was struck by the relationship of the tree to three curtained windows, lit from inside. The juxtaposition of the sinuous trunk, elegantly branching into a dark mass of leaves, with the geometry of the building’s linear bricks signaled something to the photographer. There was rhythm, pattern, contrast, and tension, but also, there was something elemental about the proximity and interaction between nature, symbolized by this lone and beautiful tree, and the presence of humanity in the form of a background-filling building, a massive dominating structure.

Bayles felt the photo’s exploration of this relationship between humanity and trees had potential as an ongoing area of study. He continued to make these urban forest pictures as they appeared to him, and eventually, the work gained the notice of journalists, gallerists, and publishers. Over many years, his work on the subject garnered articles, exhibitions, and, ultimately, a 2003 book published by the Sierra Club called Urban Forest: Images of Trees in the Human Landscape. That human-tree connection remains a central theme in his work today, including a recent and ongoing project on wildfires and forest recovery, as well as the upcoming publication of Sap In Their Veins, a photography book featuring intimate portraits of loggers and their work among the trees.

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Angela Manno, “Apis, the Honey Bee” (2016) and “Pangolin” (2021), egg tempera and gold leaf on wood (all images © and courtesy Angela Manno)

The Artist Painting Icons of Earth’s Endangered Species

While the human cannot make a blade of grass, there is liable not to be a blade of grass unless it is accepted, protected and fostered by the human. — Thomas Berry

Angela Manno applies her knowledge of Byzantine iconography to memorialize the fauna and flora whose days are threatened or already past.

Sarah Rose Sharp for Hyperallergic

February 16, 2023

In each of her emails, beneath the sign-off, Angela Manno includes a quote from Thomas Berry’s The Determining Features of Ecozoic Era (1998), whose premise is that Earth “can survive only in its integral functioning.” Manno is one of many artists who feel increasingly called to centralize issues of ecology within their practice, an aim perhaps best expressed in her ongoing series Contemporary Icons of Threatened and Endangered Species, which merges the beauty of biodiversity with the horrors of its impending loss.

“Art and activism are my dual callings and for some time, I longed to bring them both together,” Manno told Hyperallergic. Combining her training in traditional Byzantine Russian iconography and experience in environmental organizing, the artist creates “icons” dedicated to fauna and flora whose days on Earth are threatened or already past.

Angela Manno, “Apis, the Honey Bee” (2016) and “Pangolin” (2021), egg tempera and gold leaf on wood (all images © and courtesy Angela Manno)

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MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

February 20, 2023

This week we recognize    Cynthia Hooper   Cynthia Hooper, and her twenty plus year practice as a painter and research-based video artist located in Northern California.

Her early paintings (example above) from the mid to late 1990s, document the timber industry and related infrastructure in Humboldt County, California. This region's monumental log decks were once a ubiquitous sight—grand and metaphorical Ziggurats honoring the gods of progress and profit. Because of the depletion of historical timber stock (along with increased regulation and unpredictable cycles of market demand) far fewer of these iconic monuments are still around, though this industry remains regionally and internationally significant.

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Transnational Water: The Cienega de Santa Clara and the Mode, featured above, is an example of Hooper's essays/paintings describing anthropogenic wetlands in Mexico's Colorado River Delta and the wetlands' complex relationship with U.S. political and environmental policy. It is one of three panels presented for the exhibition Shifting Baselines, presented at the Santa Fe Art Institute made during the artists' residency and exhibition in 2012.

A Negotiable Utopia: The Humboldt Bay Project, 2015 (above), is an interdisciplinary media project featuring six short observational documentary videos and accompanying essays that examine and interpret the built environment of Humboldt Bay—California's second largest estuary. This project investigates the bay's natural resource economy and infrastructure (including timber, fishing, and aquaculture), its transportation (including roads, rails, and ships), as well as the bay's power infrastructure—including formerly nuclear, fossil fuel, and renewable energy. The project also documents Humboldt Bay's natural and municipal watersheds, as well as its varied conservation zones and complicated shoreline. Each video features atypical and unexpectedly graceful views of the bay, and each accompanying essay includes evidence-based narratives that honor the diversity of perspectives and experiences that index these compelling environments.

Humedales Artificiales: Three Transnational Wetlands, 2012, is the title of a video and essay media publication about the anthropogenic wetlands of the Colorado River Delta in Mexico. In the video (above), Las Arenitas is an anthropogenic site and represents a highly successful and collaborative remedy for two big borderland challenges: wetland restoration and municipal infrastructure improvement. Municipal effluent from the Baja California city of Mexicali meanders through a maze of treatment wetlands that also support thousands of local and migratory birds. After helping the local environment, this repurposed water sometimes makes it way to the Gulf of California, thereby re-connecting the Colorado River by way of the sinks and toilets of 300,000 people.

Westlands, 2011 (below), is a two-channel video installation about The Westlands water district in California's San Joaquin Valley, which is undisputedly the largest and most powerful water district in the nation. This agricultural district's outsized and highly mechanized operations grow billions of pounds of tomatoes, almonds, pistachios, wheat and cotton for the global market each year. Westlands also has the country's highest poverty rate, lowest education levels, intractable pollution and tainted water. The story of this place typifies well-intentioned Federal policy gone awry: subsidies historically devised to foster a sustainable agrarian economy for the many now promote concentrations of power and profit for the few. Despite all these troubling metrics, however, the sweeping panoramas of efficiency and servitude that define this site as a phenomenological experience often complicate predictable assumptions about it. The subtle and grandiose visual metaphors found here possess undeniable political agency, but also a capacious poetry as well.

Cynthia Hooper          makes paintings, research-based videos and essays that examine and interpret infrastructural landscapes in the United States and Mexico. Her detailed investigations patiently capture the incidental and emblematic activities that define these complicated places, and advocate for the regional laborers, activists, and researchers who tactically refashion their complex geography. Her generously observational strategies and evidence-based narratives honor the diversity of perspectives that index the sites that she studies. Hooper has worked with Tijuana's complex urban infrastructure, politicized water issues along the U.S./Mexico border, and water, power, industrial and agricultural sites in California, Oregon, Arizona, and Ohio. Recent sites examined include the reconfigured wildlife refuges of California’s Central Valley, the artificial wetlands of Mexico's Colorado River Delta, and the built environment of California's Humboldt Bay. Exhibitions and screenings include the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the Centro Cultural Tijuana, Santa Fe Art Institute, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, and MASS MoCA. Published work includes Places Journal and Arid: A Journal of Desert Art, Design and Ecology. Residencies and grants include the Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Gunk Foundation. She lives in Northern California.  www.cynthiahooper.com

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Cynthia Hooper, Eel River Log Deck, 1995, oil on canvas, 30 x 42 inches; Transnational Water, 2011-2012, watercolor and gouache with essays on paper, 18 x 24 inches; A Negotiable Utopia: The Humboldt Bay Project, 2015, videos and essays; Humedales Artificiales: Three Transnational Wetlands, 2012; Westlands, 2011, two-channel video installation, 6.5 minutes running time; portrait of the artist by Jesse Wiedel.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

February 13, 2023

This week we recognize  Perri Lynch Howard, and her twenty plus year practice in public art and acoustic installations.

Floating Datum: Fixed Grid, 2005 (above), an outdoor site-specific work, created an interstitial relationship between the natural rhythms of Pritchard Park, a 50-acre former Superfund environmental cleanup site on the shore of Bainbridge Island's Eagle Harbor in Washington State, and mankind’s systematic tendencies towards land use. Installed for three months, the work utilized 100% recycled materials and was designed to welcome the community back to a section of beach previously closed due to high toxicity. The poles reflect our human tendency to map and monitor and the wind sensors remind us to look and feel. Howard worked with the Environmental Protection Agency and Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council. The site was also a former creosote factory.

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At Ease, 2008-2011 (above), was a temporary public art project sited at Warren G. Magnuson Park in Seattle, Washington. Located at the primary threshold between the park and surrounding neighborhood, the work transformed a neglected, empty, and vandalized guard shack into a symbol of Magnuson’s military past, and transitional present, and the ongoing commitment to balance human wants and environmental needs. Howard used vinyl graphics and lit the structure from within. Project partners were Seattle Parks & Recreation, 4 Culture and Rainier Industries.

Working from audio archives at Ocean Alliance in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Howard created a compilation of signature hydrophone whale recordings from expeditions led by Dr. Roger Payne, its founder, along with colleagues dating back to 1967. Visitors entered the Ocean Alliance headquarters library, where the collection of reel-to-reels are archived, and the gallery where the artists’ sound works echoed through the space via a 4-channel speaker system while immersed in hanging textile scrolls (above), each printed with spectrogram imagery that visualize the recordings. The installation, titled Once Upon a Whale Song, was created in 2022.

A Gathering Storm, 2021 (below), included photography and photogravure, images of harbor defenses sited near the coastal waters of Puget Sound, Washington, along with field sound recordings. Fort Worden, Fort Casey, and Fort Flagler are just three of over seventy-five coastal forts that protect our harbors, cities, and waterways in the United States. Many of these emplacements are on the front lines of climate change, but were never designed to face this sort of surge. This work harnesses the power of sound to tell the little-known story of Coastal Defenses in the United States, their stalwart past, and present day vulnerabilities.

“The work evolves in series, sharing a common theme and employing a wide range of media; from painting and printmaking to drawing and collage. Subtle qualities of landscape are combined with symbols, maps, and icons to convey the complexity of real-world experience, relating to the ‘there-ness’ of everything.” perri lynch howard

Frequencies: Standing Watch, 2022 (below), is a painting from Howard's Frequencies’ series, which was inspired by extreme environments where sea meets shore and land meets sky. The work explores patterns of light and sound traveling over, under, and through the landscape, shaping our sense of place.

Perri Lynch Howard is an artist dedicated to forging new narratives from the front lines of climate change. Working in the context of extreme environments is an essential aspect of Ms. Howard’s practice, driving her curiosity to seek a deeper sense of place, beyond the dichotomy of near and far. Her artwork is a charting or mapping of sites and situations expressed through painting, drawing, sculpture and sound. Originally from Marblehead, Massachusetts, Howard received her BA from The Evergreen State College, BFA from the University of Washington, and MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work is represented by the Seattle Art Museum Gallery. She has recently completed afield recording expedition to Svalbard in the Arctic Circle, investigating the impacts of anthropogenic marine noise on whales and arctic sea life. This work was funded by the McMillen Foundation. Her projects have received support from numerous residencies and fellowships including the Montello Foundation, Civita Institute, Willapa Bay AiR, PLAYA, Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts, Jack Straw Artist Support Program, Centrum Foundation, and the Mamori Sound Project, among others. Howards’s art has a global reach through projects completed in Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Canada, and in South India as a Fulbright Scholar. www.perrilynchhoward.com

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Perri Lynch Howard,Floating Datum: Fixed Grid, 2005, Spinnaker cloth, aluminum supports, PVC pipes, 10 x 60 x 60 feet, Pritchard Park, Brainbridge Island, Washington; At Ease, 2008, vinyl graphic on existing structure, lighting from within, commissioned by Seattle Parks & Recreation, located at Warren G. Magnuson Park, Seattle, Washington; Once Upon a Whale Song, 2022, textile scrolls and sound, installation at Ocean Alliance, Gloucester, Massachusetts; A Gathering Storm, 2021, photography, photogravure, and sound; Frequencies: Standing Watch, 2022, painting with sound, 48 x 30 inches; self portrait of the artist.