Fluid Dynamics: Connecting the Drops at Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery

by Kaya Turan

From July 21st to October 29th, visitors to Stony Brook University’s Zuccaire Gallery were immersed in a space of aquatic motion: swirling whirlpools, falling rain, rising tides, melting ice, and flowing currents. “Connecting the Drops: The Power of Water,” an exhibition curated by the gallery’s director Karen Levitov, explores the kinetic capacities of water. The show presented the work of seven female artists who consider the role of water in climate crisis and environmental justice. “Connecting the Drops” emphasized the dynamic qualities of water, which are both constructive and destructive. The exhibition engaged with the ecological specificity of Long Island and Stony Brook, which occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the aboriginal territory of the Setalcott and Shinnecock peoples. “Connecting the Drops” stressed the need for connective movements, for the productive and beautiful harnessing of fluid dynamics.     

Jaanika Peerna, Ice Memory,  2021-ongoing

Several works employed water itself as artistic medium. Jaanika Peerna’s Ice Memory, a large-scale drawing reaching the gallery’s ceiling, archives water’s transformative, but vanishing, properties. Each week, Peerna returned to the gallery to melt ice onto the drawing and gradually alter its composition. In Clepsydra for Carbon, Mary Mattingly similar offers water as a method of time-measurement, with a delicately constructed arrangement of tubes, plants, and flowing water which counts carbon absorption.

Mary Mattingly, Clepsydra for Carbon, 2022

Sculptural works by Erin Genia and Courtney M. Leonard explore the foundational, but increasingly strained entanglement of humans and water. Genia’s Earthling is a life-sized figure constructed in part with architectural model turf, reminding the visitor of the ecological constitution of their own corporeality. Painted and sculpted in part directly on the gallery wall, Beach: Logbook 22 | Cull (Leonard) uses wooden pallets and oyster shells to reference the history of the Shinnecock bay’s docks. These works critique Western culture’s estrangement from the natural world, examining the ways in which human bodies and cultures move and are moved by water. Similar themes are developed in Allicia Grullón’s multichannel video work 7 Stories About Water, which examines relations of cultural and individual memory to water.

Betsy Damon, The Primary Movement of Water is the Vortex, 2018

All is not (yet) lost: the exhibition also explored the generative and re-generative motions of water. Betsy Damon’s series of Sumi ink drawings, Principles of Water, examine the vortical movements of whirlpools and eddies, emphasizing the creative and productive nature of these kinetic patterns. In swirling, inky compositions, Damon posits turbulence as a kind of genesis. The restorative capacities of and for water are also foregrounded in Go H.O.M.E Bimini (Lillian Ball), an interactive video game which occupied a darkened corner in the rear of the gallery space. Using the strategy game Go, the game asks the player to envision and enact the restoration of mangrove wetlands in the Bahamas. The exhibition accordingly asked visitors to consider the ways in which we might foster and return water’s restorative powers.

In “Connecting the Drops: The Power of Water,” water emerged as a fundamentally kinetic force. Thoroughly entangled with human life, aquatic processes make, and unmake, our world. The exhibition warned that how we relate to the flows and fluxes of water matters crucially in the time of anthropogenic climate crisis. “Connecting the Drops” both mourned and hoped, searching for rhythms that might allow for generative movement to flourish on our planet. 

Kaya Turan is a PhD student in Art History & Criticism at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on contemporary experimental film and cinematic spectatorship in relation to digital media theory and ecology. His recent work engages with process philosophy and philosophy of science, as well as theories of “elemental” media, in order to examine relations between cinematic and ecological kinetics.

Connecting the Drops: The Power of Water at the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Stony Brook University (July 21 - October 29, 2022)

Watch Zuccaire Gallery panel discussion on Indigenous Art and Environmental Issues, including Courtney M. Leonard in Connecting the Drops, October 27, 2022.

Fibers of Place: Michele Brody reconstructs local plants into visual reflections

Interview by: Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein

Integrating site-specific process-oriented paper making, Michele Brody addresses questions of localness, the natural world, and plant indigenousness. At her recent exhibition at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, presented in partnership with ecoartspace, Michele’s work reflects on both biodiversity and its loss. As a papermaker, her topic is the very fiber of her art and study whether in Vermont or in the Bronx. Her international experience has created a portfolio and knowledge base that truly embodies the idea of the “GLocal”. In our interview she discusses her experience in Vermont, her inspirations, and her process. 

Entrance detail, handmade paper with local flora

Hi Michele! What first struck me about your body of work is that you have worked creating site-specific pieces based on the local flora and fauna all over the world. How has the St. Michael’s College, Vermont area inspired you in a unique way?


When I was invited to exhibit at St. Michael’s college, the Director Brian Collier invited me to come up for a preview visit. He especially wanted to show me the School’s Nature area. A property that for years had been rented out to a farmer. Once the school regained control of the land again, they decided to let it naturally go back to being a Riparian Forest.  When I went it was still in the early stages of re-growing native species such as Goldenrod, Milkweed and in the distance Cotton wood trees. I was especially excited to see Cattails growing along a natural marsh that the local beavers helped to create so that the land could go back to being a native wetland. I was especially inspired by the narrow swath of a walkway cut into the tall meadow throughout the nature area. I wanted to re-create this experience as one entered the gallery. The feeling of walking through the tall grass meadow sprouting up on either side of you.

Exhibition entrance, handmade paper with local flora

Native plants are so central to your work, and we are living in a time when climate change is ever-present.  What aspects of changing climate and resilience measures did you become aware of during your time in Vermont?

Ironically, it was not until I started driving again after not owning a car for 20 years that I became more aware of the abundance of plant life along the roads and highways. While diving up to Vermont I was most attuned to looking for Cattails and Milkweed which are both Native to the area, but less and less available due to be crowded out by the non-native species of Phragmites and Mug wort. But once I entered Vermont, I was pleasantly surprised to see more of the native species growing along the highways. I believe this is mainly due to Vermont being less developed than the rest of the Northeast. Also, while on site at Saint Michael’s it was exciting to learn about the “Nature area” project to return farmland to being a natural wetland. The beavers were especially happy about this, and the fruits of their labors could certainly be seen, as well as the return of native species taking back the land.

Your knowledge and observations about the nature around you are so intimate. What have these plants taught you about the world that people often overlook?

The main thing I have learned that no matter what we as humans try to do to control and manage Nature, especially with the development of monocultures and agriculture, Nature will in the end find its own way to survive. It may not be the same as before, such as having non-native species take over the land where natives once thrive. But over time, nature will find its own balance and become once again more diverse and in abundance.

Exhibition entrance, handmade paper with local flora

Since we are talking about balance, I noticed that several pieces use both positive and negative space and imprinting to leave reliefs of local flora. What is the intention you have behind integrating some flora and imprinting others? And what role do non-native or Indigenous plants play?

Much of my current work is inspired by Rachel Carson’s seminal book “Silent Spring.” The title for this series that integrates positive and negative imprints of local flora is "Nature in Absentia." The goal of "Nature in Absentia" is to illustrate how the current loss of ecological biodiversity within the natural environment due to over development, pollution and climate change is in stark contrast to the ever expanding cultural and racial diversity throughout the world. The impetus is to deconstruct and redefine the traditional practice of categorizing plants and animals as either native, non-native or invasive within a particular ecosystem in comparison to the ever-growing diversity of human populations through immigration, and to see how being sensitive to cultivating a balance between plant species can be mirrored in humans.

In this effort to deconstruct and redefine traditional categorizations, you are using site-specific fibers. How has your medium and process inspired you in your work?

The show in Vermont is titled after a recent series of handmade paper works called Papers of Place. For this series I have been producing handmade paper collages with pulp processed from natural seasonal detritus gathered from specific locations related to my practice and home. The series started when I was working as an Artist in Residence in 2018 at the Wave Hill Cultural Center and Garden in the Riverdale section of The Bronx. The work is very processed oriented involving the choice of location and plants, watching the seasons, knowing when best to harvest and gather materials, drying out and pressing the plants, then soaking the plants in water to loosen the fibers (which can get rather stinky in a one-bedroom apartment/studio), then I boil the fibers, pulverize the fibers in a beater until finally I can then get down to actually making the paper.

St. Michael’s Nature Area/Riparian Forest, Vermont

I believe it! And admire your dedication despite your space limitations. As a result, many of your works present organic forms which are often textural and allow the viewer to see the elements you have added. What is your visual philosophy regarding viewership and these textures?

The essence of my practice thrives on the interaction with new communities by exploring what it means to establish roots within an unfamiliar environment. With each new location I conduct a careful investigative method that involves the gathering of regional materials, native plants, local stories, and historic research. I employ this process to create site-generated works of art that illuminate the unobserved in our day-to-day surroundings and the challenges facing our environment. I am intrigued with the process of creating a controlled environment where the work organically develops and changes over time. Building from this foundation, my work represents the daily flux and naturally occurring entropy surrounding us, while exploring how memory and time simultaneously erode and enhance the interpretations of our experiences.

And lastly, what can art do that other forms of reflection and observation miss?

Art has a way of communicating beyond language. Some can be heavy hitting and political, but the most successful artworks are the ones that subtly change one’s point of view, revealing things that may not have been seen before. Providing the viewer with a new outlook on the world, and hopefully a better appreciation for the beauty found in all things, in particular the day-to-day environment we take for granted.

Thank you, Michele! It has been fantastic to interview you and very inspiring to think of the literal integration of a subject in an artwork. 

Papers of Place at McCarthy Art Gallery, St. Michael’s College, Vermont (closed October 29, 2022)

Cynthia H. Veloric and Diane Burko in front of Summer Heat 1,2; 2020. Mixed media on canvas, 84” x 162” overall.

Risky Beauty: Aesthetics and Climate Change: Not a Minute Too Soon

By Arden Kass

Risky Beauty: Aesthetics and Climate Change (closed October 28, 2022), curated by Cynthia Haveson Veloric, PhD, at Philadelphia’s Main Line Art Center, was an informative and affecting show. Showcasing six eco-artists, it presented a thoughtfully panoramic overview of life in the Anthropocene era from a diversity of artistic perspectives, both in a stylistic and literal sense. Yet distinctive as these works are, they share a common and disturbing subtext.

Every art history course identifies the conflicting forces of Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death, as the struggle at the heart of most of the world’s great masterpieces in every artform. Similarly, the works in this show embody the (curator’s) view that beauty and devastation can share space, that the eye and brain are capable of processing both inputs simultaneously. What to make of that information is our problem — and responsibility. But each artist here undeniably pairs beauty with a message about the bottomless risk we take in continuing to distance our emotions and actions from the reality of climate change.

Stacy Levy, Missing Waters, video, Painting the historic Norman Kill Creek flowing into the Bushwick Inlet, Brooklyn, NY,  2018;on right,Flushing Bay Kayak and Canoe Launch, Marina Road Corona, New York, 2020. Chalk and water on pavement, 120 yards x 15 yards.

Stacy Levy, for example, “collaborates with the force of water” to illustrate the pathways in urban areas of underground streams that have been paved over but originally provided a watershed for storm overflow. Covering the asphalt with chalk paintings that evoke almost aboriginal patterns of waves and the rhythms of water, Levy signals how, as storms intensify, water will find a way to disperse, often by forcefully re-claiming its own former pathways.

Deirdre Murphy scatters delicate, seemingly whimsical marks like handfuls of confetti across brightly colored, flat wooden disks representing Earth. Based on the flight routes taken by Arctic Terns fleeing their homes in search of more hospitable nesting grounds and interspersed with tiny dots that trace the spread of pathogens in our increasingly unstable atmosphere, the patterns chart the course of environmental disruption, chillingly underscored by the artist’s narrative of scientific research in which she participated.  

Visitor contemplates Deirdre Murphy’s Invisible Currents Celestial Maps, 2022. Mixed media print on Japanese rice paper, 24” diameter.

Hiro Sakaguchi expresses his “concerns for the wellbeing of this planet that is our home” in a candy-colored, childlike palette that belies the dire import of his imagery. Beneath their appealing surfaces, Sakaguchi’s paintings detail the rapacious devastation of our world in comics-inflected line drawings; from the approach of machines of war glimpsed through a scrim of crocuses, to the sheer chaos unleashed from outer space to ocean by human incursions into every dimension of the galaxy. They are both beguiling and terrifying.

Working in an aesthetic that references “the sensory experience of being within the forest” Amie Potsic creates lush images of leaf canopies photographed or printed onto draped fabric. Her installation conjured a visual and sense memory that placed us in this sacred space essential to our survival, while silently raising the question of what will exist when that curtain is ripped away – when development, logging, or deadly wildfires, turn these magical environments into nothing more tangible than a memory.

Tim Portlock composes digitized versions of imaginary urban landscapes to question the definitions of wilderness and civilization; what represents progress, what portends dystopia? And above all, what has become of the natural landscapes these human-made vistas are replacing?

From left to right Hiro Sakaguchi, Deirdre Murphy, Amie Potsic, curator Cynthia H. Veloric, Stacy Levy, Diane Burko surrounded by Potsic’s Paradise, 2019. Archival pigment print on silk (rolled onto bolts).

One of the staunchest and most irrefutable artistic voices on climate change, Diane Burko has devoted herself since 2006 to “critical thinking... about the impact humans are having on the environment.” In monumental and/or multi-panel images of rigorously designed, masterfully painted landscapes, often documented over time and supported by the inclusion of maps and charts, Burko does not traffic in metaphor or imagined scenarios, but in scientific fact. If there is a fantastical, allegorical dimension to her work, it is in the explosive contrast between the beauty captured in her images, and the unimaginable outcome of how it is being altered in our lifetimes…and how that plays out as we walk away from the magnificent vista portrayed with meta-accuracy before us.

Yes, here on the East Coast, it is easier to be lulled into the sense that our tree-shaded, sun-dappled forests are endlessly resilient, or to embrace the hopeful notion that “something” might help us prevent catastrophe. This show illuminated the global “nature” of our situation, and its urgency. Risky Beauty, and more exhibitions like it, are both timely and essential. 

Catalogue here

Arden Kass writes for stage and film, as well as interviews, cultural essays, and personal narratives.

The ecoartspace November 2022 e-Newsletter for subscribers is here

"There is a dutiful, yet delightful dimension to Siegel’s work. A great task produces a very simple thing. Yet this may be the only clear and dependable equation. Other connections and conclusions are variable and elusive. Generically characterized as big, spare forms of recycled newspapers, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, shredded rubber, or other jetsam, there is a serious content to this seemingly unaffected work. Remarkable and robust physical evidence and material accumulations convey a tension of imminent vulnerability and gradual dissolution. There is a puzzling experience of dissonant beauty in these ungainly objects made of disposable, if not unsightly materials. Often mimicking natural forms and processes, the conspicuously artificial work “fits” its environment in a plain, natural manner." – Patricia C. Phillips, art historian and critic, Sculpture Magazine, 2003 

Phillips, P. (2015). “Artistic Practices and Ecoaesthetics in Post-sustainable Worlds”. In C. Crouch, N. Kaye, & J. Crouch (Eds.), An introduction to sustainability and aesthetics: The arts and design for the environment (pp. 55-68). Boca Raton, Florida: Brown Walker Press.

The concept of Plastic Words and the book The Tyranny of Modular Language by Uwe Pörksen, published in 1995, was brought up this weekend, and our member Perdita Phillips, in Australia, shared her paper below regarding the word sustainability. This concept is the focus on her contribution to the ecoartspace Earthkeepers Handbook, soon to be released.

"The concept of sustainability, its discourse and societal application has been subject to pointed critique, including claims that the term has become an empty rhetorical vessel, is liable to greenwashing or that critical reflection is required on the political and philosophical underpinnings of sustainability and sustainable development (Holden 2010; Phillips 2007). Part of the critical framing around an aesthetics of sustainability has already been explored by artists and thinkers such as Maja and Reuben Fowkes (2012) and Sacha Kagan (2011). Sustainability’s broad nature mirrors the complexity of environmentalism and allows for many different aesthetic approaches. It asks of us to decrease our consumption and also to take a transdisciplinary perspective (Kagan, 2010). However a significant trend in twenty-first century relations with the natural world has been a ‘darkening’ in the tone of debate and mobilisation of apocalyptic metaphors. Climate denial by some in society is mirrored by an underlying zeitgeist of despair and guilt in areas of the environmental movement (Anderson, 2010). I have argued elsewhere that this has left us open to ‘zombie environmentalism’ (Phillips, 2012b). Is it possible to stir from this apparent stalemate to a state of flourishing, by moving on from disaster? Morton (2012) argues for a re-examination of sadness and Soper (2008) reconfigures austerity into alternative hedonism. TJ Demos (2013) discusses the significance of a political ecology to artists working towards new formulations of eco-aesthetics. A key strategy for arts practice is to relinquish “the privileged position of its autonomous and exceptionalist positioning” at the same time as maintaining a ‘countervisuality’, or ability to see things and see them differently (Mizroeff, 2013). In my own work I see eco-aesthetics as a broad set of tendencies that will take us into new futures. Elsewhere I have outlined eight sensibilities in artworks that are more adaptive at dealing with uncertainty and imperfection, risk and opportunity (Phillips, 2012a). Working through Lauren Berlant’s ideas of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) as a way of escaping this sense of environmental procrastination, I’ve been considering how an artwork can both embody and encourage resilience in an unruly world, something that is still positive at the same time as it ‘stays with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2013). In a recent project about Little Penguins in Sydney I’ve been grappling with applying some sense of anticipatory readiness or “a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces” (Bennett, 2010, p. xiv). Through this practice-based example, this paper invites an aesthetics of action in the face of the inevitable uncertainties inherent in an ecological worldview."

Read full paper, here

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

October 17, 2022

This week we recognize   Pam Longobardi, and her twenty plus year practice focused on plastic pollution.

"I engage citizens in active processes of cleaning ascare:  action as antidote to experience the transformative connective shift that occurs. Plastic is the geologic marker of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or most poignantly, Eremocene, the ‘Age of Loneliness’(E.O.Wilson). Plastic production, dissemination and zombie afterlife contributes to Earth’s present 6th Mass Extinction. In addition to gallery/museum installations, I do site-work, involving forms of distance messaging such as mirror communication, Semaphore, and S.O.S. messages shot by drone, as performative pieces, projecting messages of attention. This, along with my studio-based painting practice involving phenomenology and chemistry, makes up the whole of my work."    click images for more info

"Plastic objects are the cultural archeology of our time. These objects I see as a portrait of global late-capitalist consumer society, mirroring our desires, wishes, hubris and ingenuity.  These are objects with unintended consequences that become transformed as they leave the quotidian world and collide with nature to be transformed, transported and regurgitated out of the shifting oceans. The ocean is communicating with us through the materials of our own making. The plastic elements initially seem attractive and innocuous, like toys, some with an eerie familiarity and some totally alien. At first, the plastic seems innocent and fun, but it is not. It is dangerous. We are remaking the world in plastic."

"In keeping with the movement of drift of these material artifacts, I prefer using them in a transitiveform as installation. All of the work can be dismantled, reconfigured but nearly impossibly recycled. The objects are presented as specimens on steel pins or wired together to form larger structures. I am interested in the collision between nature and global consumer culture. Ocean plastic is a material that can unleash unpredictable dynamics. As a product of culture that exhibits visibly the attempts of nature to reabsorb and regurgitate this invader, ocean plastic has profound stories to tell."

In 2013, Longobardi created a site-specific installation for a special project of the Venice cultural association Ministero di Beni Culturali (MiBAC), and the Ministry of Culture of Rome, for the 55th Venice Biennale on the Island of San Francesco del Deserto in the Venetian Lagoon; a work made from plastic water bottles, crystals and a mirrored satellite dish that signaled an apology to St. Francis across the lagoon to the island of Burano (below).

Pam Longobardi  lives and works in Atlanta as Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of Art at Georgia State University. Her Drifters Project, which began in 2006 after encountering mountainous piles of plastic on remote Hawaiian beaches, is ongoing,following the world ocean currents. With the Drifters Project, she collects, documents and transforms oceanic plastic into installations, public art and photography. The work provides a visual statement about the engine of global consumption, the vast amounts of plastic objects’ impact on the world’s most remote places and its’ creatures, framed within a conversation about globalism and conservation. She has exhibited across the US and in Greece, Monaco, Germany, Finland, Slovakia, China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Costa Rica and Poland. Longobardi participated in the 2013 GYRE expedition to remote coastal areas of Alaska and created project-specific large-scale works for exhibition at the Anchorage Museum February 2014 that traveled nationwide to five US museums. She was featured in a National Geographic film on the GYRE expedition and her Drifters Project was featured in National Geographic magazine. Longbardi is Oceanic Society’s Artist-In-Nature.

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Pam Longobardi, Drifters Objects; ForensicLab, Ocean Gleaning, solo exhibition at Baker Museum, Florida, 2022; Baker Museum, back room, Laocoon Threnodfy Bounty Pilfered, 2022; Reflecting Web of the Anthropocene (An Apology to Saint Francis), 2013, Venice, Italy; below, portrait of the artist.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

October 10, 2022

This week we recognize    Debra Swack, and her media and sound work focused on the interstice of humans and non-humans.

Swack’s work is a catalyst for change, innovation, and collaboration in helping to solve world problems. For example: ‘Bloom’ addresses plant consciousness; ‘Cloud Mapping Project’ addresses climate change, surveillance, artificial intelligence, machine learning and creativity (can machines create?); and ‘Animal Patterning Project’ addresses the history of genetically manipulating animals, environmental displacement through urbanization, and the rise of infectious diseases due to deforestation such as COVID. click on images for more information

Bloom (above) utilizes the research of evolutionary biology to present digital simulations of the sounds that plants communicate bio-acoustically through vibrations. The work was featured in the New York Academy of Science's fall 2017 magazine about scientific innovations for the next 100 years. It was also presented in Sound, Images and Data for Leonardo Electronic Almanac (MIT Press) at NYU, and for EvoS (Evolutionary Studies at SUNY Binghamton).

Cloud Mapping Project (below) addresses surveillance, artificial intelligence, machine learning and creativity (can machines create?). The Project was presented at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, the American Academy of Rome (where she was a visiting artist along with William Kentridge, Joan Tower, and Vincent Katz), and Banff Centre in Canada. At Banff, the work was the subject of a Fulbright eye-tracking workshop and an exhibition of related works under a Leighton Colony Residency. In 2019, Cloud Mapping Project was the subject of an interview by science journalist Clarissa Wright for NatureVolve.

Animal Patterning Project (below), is an ephemeral dance performance about our complex relationship with other-animals and simulates their return by projecting their likeness onto the urban environment they once inhabited. It includes the historical practice of taxidermy, our unique ability to genetically manipulate their bodies and skins for our own purposes, and the dilemma of displaced indigenous other-animals that urban development creates. The project was selected in 2021 for the online presentation and book Becoming Feral. It is a 2021 recipient of a City Arts grant from the NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs and New York Foundation of the Arts.

Debra Swack             is a digital and sound artist who creates transformative participatory experiences about the most critical issues of our time. She received Fulbright grants from Banff Centre (2015) and Tel Aviv University (2018). Her writings have been published by MIT, and she was included in Art and Innovation at Xerox Parc (MIT, 1999). In 2019, she was selected by the New York Academy of Science, Pratt Institute and Guerrilla Science, to participate in Conveying Science Through Art, who believe that public engagement in science is critical to a well-functioning society. Called ‘an important work,’ by Margaret Morton (Ford Foundation), The mixed reality Monument Project, about heroes and the democratization of memorialization, was shortlisted by Creative Time/NEW INC at the New Museum in 2019 for an installation in Central Park. The project was a 2020 recipient of a Mellon Foundation grant and a 2018 Creative Engagement grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, in collaboration with Microsoft, the Siddhartha School, and the Rubin Foundation.

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Debra Swack, Birdsongs, Sonic Fragments Sound art Festival, Princeton University, 2008; Bloom, 2017, featured at New York Academy of Sciences; Cloud Mapping, 2014, video edition of 10, featured in Fragile Rainbow at Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, May 2022; Animal Patterning, 2015, commissioned by Pratt Institute & the West Harlem Art Fund; below, portrait of the artist.

Rudiments, oil on panel, 18 x 24 inches, and sculpture: clay, gouache, wire stand

Adoration, Observation and Visual Ecology: Ashley Eliza Williams Wishes to Speak with the Growth in the Forest

Interview by: Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein

Ashley Eliza Williams is practicing through careful study, observation, and sentience, the ability to communicate with the building blocks of the natural world. She is at one with the lichens, mosses, lithophytes, and most solid rocks of the forest. Her visions are filled with future ecologies based on the tales and dreams of both the oldest forebearers and the most adaptable around us. I had the pleasure of asking her questions to her practice…

Resonant, oil on panel, 40 x 30 inches

Dear Ashley, in your process of seeking sentience in the natural world, what have you found so far and what has most surprised you?  

Although a rock in the forest isn’t “alive” by any scientific metric, it hosts an ecosystem of beings with relational and sensory capacities: lichens, mosses, insects, small mammals, bacteria, algae, and other lithophytes. These beings sense the world and interact with each other in wildly different ways. In a certain sense, when you contemplate a rock, you are in dialogue with an entire community of sentient beings. This feels magical and incredible to me, but it is very real.  

Index Fossil, oil on panel, 20 x 20 inches, and sculpture: wire stand, gouache

I believe you, perhaps we are not listening closely enough. In the visual depictions of your findings, you often choose a chart format for your compositions. What has led you to explore this representational form and what role does color choice have in what you are representing?  

I’ve always loved field notebooks and scientific charts. I think they are beautiful and I’m fascinated by the kinds of information scientists have chosen to record throughout the ages.  Why is one piece of information more important than another? What do these choices say about an individual scientist, the cultures that we are a part of, and our anthropocentric worldviews? Being an artist gives me an excuse to play with and think about these questions.  

Since 2014, I’ve been using color charts to try to abstract or distill experiences in nature and my attempts at interspecies communication. My latest project is an attempt to communicate with a lichen. I’ve been visiting the same patch of lichen every day. Each day, I create a color strip that reflects my experience with the lichen. I’ve visited the lichen in the evening, in the morning, in the middle of the night, when I’m feeling hopeful, and when I’m depressed. Each time I interact, I mix a very specific color to describe that interaction. The colors are a record of my many (and mostly failed) communication attempts.  

Convergence Studies 2, oil on canvas, 20 x 20 inches

Beyond your process, how much of your work is scientific explorations, spiritual findings, and fantasy? 

It’s a mix of real and imagined. My partner is a scientist, and my projects often involve working closely with scientists in the field. But I also love imagining potential future beings and ecologies. I believe that there is a link between the human imagination and biodiversity. Artists who care about ecology need to be wild dreamers and we need wild landscapes to be able to dream. I think it’s important to imagine what a healthier future ecology might look like. What animals, plants, and ecosystems will exist in the future if we don’t drive everything to extinction? Most of the images I paint and sculpt are imaginary or highly abstracted. But they are built on a foundation of obsessive observation, research, a love of wild places, and my deep respect for and curiosity about all living beings, especially those that are quiet and easily overlooked.  

Nucleus, oil on panel, 18 x 24 inches, and sculpture: clay, wire stand, cut paper, gouache, coral

Thank you, Ashley. And good luck with your incredible interspecies goals. We have a lot to learn from this earth. 

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

October 3, 2022

This week we recognize Eliza Evans  Eliza Evans, and her work focused on climate and resource extraction.

Evans' current and ongoing project, All the Way to Hell (above), which began in 2020,is an activist art model for disrupting fossil fuel development on private land in the U.S.The monumental work, currently with over 7,000 participants, converts hundreds of individual gestures into a new form of environmental resistance at the intersection of property law, fossil fuel business practice, and bureaucracy. The project transfers rights from single mineral properties to hundreds of people to impeded fossil fuel development. Evans will attempt to file the first deeds in Oklahoma this month. (click images for more information)

Time Machine (2019-ongoing, above) is a durational and interactive work in which the artist spent 8-hours inside a mass-produced greenhouse. The outside and inside temperature difference served as a kind of climate change scenario generator. As the temperature rose during the day it was amplified inside the greenhouse with attendant stress on her body. The following day the artist invited visitors inside the Time Machine to experience a possible future.

The Compact (above) is three seven-foot tall cast concrete figures that enlist Cycladic, Greek, and 3D-scanned female forms to examine the compression of individual agency over millennia and our more contemporary assent to the myriad ways we are surveilled, measured, and archived. The figure is made from clearly defined parts loosely held by two threaded rods and patches of mortar. The rebar matrixes that reinforce the concrete reference the inscription of gridded systems on our bodies and our actions.

Pause (2018, above) is three 10-foot squares plots surrounded by an 8 to 9-foot tall fence made of t-posts and tinted monofilament. The installation is an unambiguous artwork inscribed in the forest that by its shape and materials alludes to science, gardening, cultivation, and management. There is no gate or passageway into the plots. The viewer is excluded from the plot’s interior but for a 12-18-inch gap between the forest floor and the bottom of the fencing. The viewer is left to consider what is protected and why. Inside the plots, the forest will be for the most part unmolested by both deer and humans for the duration of the work.

Below is a well core sample and quitclaim mineral deed representing Evan's All the Way to Hell project in a gallery setting.

Eliza Evans  experiments with sculpture, print, video, and digital media to identify disconnections and absurdities in social, economic, and ecological systems. Her work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum (2021), Missoula Art Museum (2021), Austin Peay State University, Clarksville TN (2021), Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, NY (2020), Alexey von Schlippe Gallery, University of Connecticut (2020), Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY (2019), Edward Hopper House Museum, Nyack, NY (2019), and BRIC, Brooklyn (2017), and has appeared in the New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Dissent Magazine. A law review article on her work is forthcoming in the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal. Residencies include the LMCC Art Center (2022), the Art Law Program (2021), National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, UC Santa Barbara (2020), and Bronx Museum AIM. She is currently a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator. Evans was born in a Rust Belt steel town and raised in rural Appalachia. She currently splits her time between Tennessee and New York.

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Eliza Evans, All the Way to Hell, 2020-ongoing; Time Machine, 2019-ongoing; The Compact, 2019, concrete, steel; Pause, 2018, posts, monofilament; All the Way to Hell, 2020-ongoing; below is portrait of the artist.