MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

September 12, 2022

This week we recognize   Sarah Kanouse   Sarah Kanouse based in Boston,  and her recent works including a solo performance "My Electric Genealogy (above), which will premiere in Los Angeles this month.

For nearly forty years, Kanouse's grandfather worked for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, designing, planning, and supervising the network of lines connecting the city to its distant sources of electricity. His legacy includes some of the most polluting fossil fuel infrastructure in the country—much of it located out of state, on Indigenous land. As these power plants finally and belatedly come down, the performance asks what is owed to the communities long harmed by this infrastructure? Weaving together signal moments in the city’s history with voices of Diné advocates for just, equitable transition, “My Electric Genealogy” is an essayistic working-through of energy as a personal and collective inheritance at a moment of eco-political reckoning.

"A People’s Atlas of the Nuclear Colorado (above) is a digital public humanities project that documents and interprets the relational geographies of nuclear materials developed and deployed by the United States. With contributions by scholars, students, and artists, the Atlas offers the public an opportunity to explore, research, and document nuclear materials and ecologies of Colorado. Powered by the Scalar publishing platform, the Atlas is loosely organized around the nuclear fuel cycle, from extraction, milling, and processing to the assembly and deployment of weapons to the storage and monitoring of waste. It challenges, however, conventional models of this process by weaving in its 'shadow side:' environmental contamination, workplace exposures, boom and bust economies, geopolitical instability."

"Beyond Property (below) is a suite of tools guiding inquiry into the proposition that property is an Anthropocene technology. The collection includes: a book of readings; a suite of cards for embodied exploration; a small sculptural object; and a section of barbed wire removed from an American fenceline decoupaged or “bandaged” with text from the writings from Gerrard Winstanley, the 17th century English activist-philosopher. Rooted in Quakerism, Winstanley’s True Levellers movement enacted a powerful critique of the morality of private property at the moment of its formalization through enclosure. The project began as part of Field Guides to the Anthropocene Drift, published by Field Station 2 with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Goethe Institute, Chicago." [Free downloads]

"Ecologies of Acknowledgement (below) was commissioned by the University Hall Gallery at UMass Boston for the exhibition Local Ecologies, which included a video, letterpress print, and boat tour, focuses on the land use histories of Deer Island in the Boston Harbor. Going beyond mere ‘recognition’ of Native territory, the project asks instead what it means to accept the relationships and responsibilities that come with living on occupied land. In the 17th century, Deer Island was a forced Indian removal and incarceration site, where between 500 and 1,000 people suffered from dire conditions comparable to a concentration camp. It is now the site of Boston’s wastewater treatment plant."

"The experimental nonfiction film Grassland (below) uses stop-motion animation, live action footage, text fragments, and expressive sound to excavate the stratigraphic layers of belief, ecology, practice, and geology that form a northeastern Colorado landscape. Carved out of decimated ranch lands during the Dust Bowl, the grassland is both a conservation zone and a working landscape. Cattle grazing, nuclear missiles, hydraulic fracturing, and wind power generation co-exist within a few miles of each other. Less explication than essay, the film locates the grassland in historic and geologic time, ranging over changing frameworks of law, ideology, and cosmology, variable and contradictory human practices, and the material and geological forces of the land itself. Meditative original footage of the grassland merges with collage animations created from diagrams, drawings, and found photography to portray the refuge’s subterranean activities, from well drilling to missile storage to soil sedimentation. The resulting nineteen-minute film is a poetic and unsettling portrait of a complex, evolving place."

Sarah Kanouse is an interdisciplinary artist and critical writer who examines the politics of landscape and space. Migrating between video, photography, and performative forms, her research-based creative projects shift the visual dimension of the landscape to allow hidden stories of environmental and social transformation to emerge. Her creative work has been screened or exhibited at Documenta 13, the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago, the Cooper Union, the Clark Art Institute, the Smart Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and in numerous academic institutions as CUNY Graduate Center, George Mason University, University of California Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin. She has written about performative and site-based contemporary art practices in the journals: Acme, Leonardo, Parallax, and Art Journal; as well the edited volumes Ecologies, Agents, Terrains, Critical Landscapes, Art Against the Law, and Mapping Environmental Issues in the City. A 2019 Rachel Carson Fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Sarah Kanouse is Associate Professor of Media Arts in the Department of Art + Design at Northeastern University. She earned her MFA degree in Studio Art from the University of Illinois, and a BA in Art, magna cum laude, from Yale University. readysubjects.org

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Sarah Kanouse, My Electric Genealogy, 2021-2022; A People's Atlas of the Nuclear Colorado, 2021; Beyond Property, Field Guides to the Anthropocene Drift, 2021; Ecologies of Acknowledgement, traveling exhibition 2019-2021; Grassland, 2019, nonfiction film recently screened at the Mimesis Documentary Film Festival, Boulder, Colorado; portrait of the artist (below).

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

September 5, 2022

This week we recognize the ecological work of  Renata Padovan   Renata Padovan based in  São Paulo, Brazil.

In the last two decades, Padovan's work has narrated the consequences of anthropogenic transformations on the landscape. Navigating between landart and art engaged with socio-environmental issues, her work has a strong denunciatory character. Captivated by what is ephemeral and transient, the artist creates memories about life’s state of impermanence, documenting the impacts of natural resource exploitation and the construction of mega-infrastructures, the foundations of neoliberal capitalism.

Returning the water to the seam, 2015 (above) is a video documentation of an action performed at the former Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. The artist walks back and forth on what was once the bottom of the sea, watering can in hand, pouring water on the sandy soil. As she walks, her footsteps mark deep into the ground of what was once the fourth largest inland lake in the world. Due to soviet policy of growing cotton in the region, waters of the two rivers that fed the sea, Syr Darya and Amu Darya, were diverted to irrigation channels. In about 20 years the rivers dried out. The Aral Sea dehydrated becoming a vast desert of polluted sand, a socioenvironmental disaster. The fishing industry collapsed and only those who had no conditions to move out still live in the inhospitable area.  

Frozen at sea, 2009 (below) was developed during Padovan's Nes artist residency in    Skagaströnd,    Iceland. It is a large sculpture made of ice, in the shape of Iceland, set afloat in the sea where it drifts until meltdown. The work had double meanings, one concerning global warming and the melting of glaciers, and the other concerning the economic crisis Iceland was going through at the time.

The installation ‘Irreversible’ (below) presents a legacy of destruction and impunity, linked to the history of colonization of the Amazonian rivers for the production of energy, revealing the real socio-environmental cost of hydroelectric plants in the Amazon. The artist creates an immersive environment about the Balbina Dam disaster, the first in a series of large hydroelectric plants built in the Amazon basin in the 1980s. After more than thirty years, such constructions continue to be imposed by State policies, despite their devastating impact on local communities and ecosystems.

The piece “Para Saber Onde Está Pisando” (To Know Were You Stand), stems from a drawing, a graphic representation that seeks, on a macro scale, to bring a new sensitivity to the destruction of the Amazon (below). After being transferred onto canvas, the drawing was hand embroidered in wool, by artisans from the state of Pernambuco. Representing the Amazon area as a biome, the artist maps the deforested regions in red, protected forests in green and indigenous lands in ochre, while gray areas correspond to oil blocks. The white areas, shown within the external limits, refer to non-destined public forests, which are public lands susceptible to speculation, invasions and squattings. The piece establishes a counterpoint between the act of constructing the work, expressed by weaving, which is manual and feminine, with the act of destruction, which is male and mechanized.

Renata Padovan      graduated from the Social Communication Department that belongs to the Faculty FAAP (Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado). In 2001, she was given a scholarship from “Virtuose” to do a masters program at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. The artist has been participating in various residencies around the world, such as Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada; Nagasawa Art Park, Japan, Braziers international artists workshop in England and NES in Skagaströnd, Iceland. Her solos shows include: Baró Gallery, Eduardo H. Fernandes Gallery, Thomas Cohn Gallery, Centro Cultural São Paulo, Millan Gallery, Valu Oria Gallery, Brazilian Sculpture Museum in São Paulo, and in Rio de Janeiro at Espaço Cultural dos Correios, Paço Imperial e Açude Museum. Padovan's work has been exhibiting at group shows, festivals, national and international, and in Brazil. www.renatapadovan.me

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Renata Padovan, Venal Series, Balbina, 2018, Food coloriong on tree, Intervention at the Balbina Hydroelectric Dam, Amazonas, considered one of the biggest ecological disaster in Brazil; Returning the water to the sea, 2015, action performed on what was once the bed of the Aral Sea, Uzbekistan; Frozen at sea, 2009, Ice sculpture in the shape of Iceland, launched in the sea where it floated until complete melt down, Skagaströnd, Iceland, 60 x 86 cm; Irreversível | Irreversible, 2019, Photos of dead trees at Balbina dam, one of the worst ecological disasters in Brazil, Large format prints on voile fabric. Installation at Paiol da Cultura, INPA, Manaus; Para Saber Onde Está Pisando (To Know Were You Stand), 2022 at Casa Nova Arte e Cultura Contemporanea; Portrait of the artist.

The ecoartspace September 2022 e-Newsletter for non-members is here

Published August 1, 2022  Shoutout LA

We had the good fortune of connecting with Linda Gass and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Linda, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking

With very few exceptions, my best experiences and most satisfying projects in life have come from risk-taking. Taking risks has enabled me to learn new skills, taught me to be more comfortable with the unknown and discomfort. I wouldn’t be the artist I am today if I hadn’t taken the risk of walking away from a successful career in the software industry where I was managing large projects alongside brilliant and wonderful colleagues. But I wasn’t doing what I love, and it was time to do what I love, to make art full time. I view risk taking as a necessary part of staying true to my vision for life and art. I go through plenty of ups and downs with those risks. The beginning is charged with the excitement of embarking on a new idea. Then the reality of not knowing how to do it sets in and that old emotion of fear of failure tries to take over. Risk taking definitely includes a lot of type-2 fun: miserable while it’s happening and fun to look back on. I’ve found the best way to deal with the fear is with what I’ve learned from long-distance backpacking: if you just keep taking one step at a time, you can travel more miles than you thought possible. I break large problems into smaller problems that are easier to solve. I do experiments and tests, almost as a methodical form of play. Sometimes I’m successful in solving the problems and other times I fail. I can be stubborn and the failures make me feel even more determined to find a solution. I’ve learned that failures are a form of success because it if you are willing to analyze your failures, it often leads to the solution.

Continue reading here

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

August 29, 2022

This week we recognize  Fredericka Foster and her contemplative and dedicated work focused on water.

"Our bodies are mostly water, and we are an intimate part of the hydrological cycle. Think about this when you first awaken – we are all water filters. We intrinsically know this, and that all life depends on water. Looking at water, or a painting of water, resonates emotionally in our bodies and minds."

Foster, a painter and photographer, works primarily with the theme of water to raise awareness and examine its centrality to life; how its movement shapes the world socioeconomically, environmentally and subconsciously. An accomplished colorist using a limited palette and many layers of paint, she works "in the romantic landscape tradition of Dove, Hartley, Burchfield and O'Keeffe." She has shown her work since the late 1970s, though the AIDS epidemic, healing and dying has inspired her paintings and installations since the 1990s. Buddhist practice influences her art and she has engaged in public talks on this topic with composer Philip Glass.

"Each water painting begins with a photograph. I travel to bodies of water ranging from the deep fjords of Norway to the industrialized Hudson River, choosing images that stimulate my imagination and that showcase the complexity of water as it plays with light, wind, and the earth beneath it. These photos are models for, but not dictators of, the painting process. My vision changes even as I seek to get the image down, and I experiment with ways to mix and layer pigments in order to trap the evanescent nature of the experience." 

Foster often collaborates with artists, scientists and non-profit organizations on water in relation to the environment, pollution and climate change. To teach about the water crisis, she has presented her work to hundreds of scientists, including a performance titled   Exploring a Catastrophe to Water Through Science and Artat the Sage Assembly 2017, based on a sewage spill into Puget Sound that same year; and an exhibition and talk at the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries. Her video series, Like a Circle in Water, was part of the Elements video series commissioned by the Tricycle Foundation in 2014, an official selection of the Awareness Festival and Blue Ocean Film Festival.

Fredericka Foster    grew up surrounded by water, and with a Sami great grandmother who nutured a mythical reverence for water and water culture for the artist. As a cultural activist, through her painting and exhibition curating, Foster raises and sustains dialogue, transforming our understanding and misperceptions in relation to the environment. She is known for guest curating and participating in The Value of Water at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City (2011-2012), which was the largest exhibition to ever appear at the Cathedral. The show anchored a year long initiative by the Cathedral on our dependence upon water, and featured over 200 artworks by forty artists, including Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo, Mark Rothko, William Kentridge, April Gornik, Kara Walker, Kiki Smith, Pat Steir, Edwina Sandys, Alice Dalton Brown, Teresita Fernandez, Eiko Otake, and Bill Viola. Foster is the founder of Think About Water, a water advocacy website that gathers cultural activists and their work together in order to strengthen their cause. Foster’s notable one-person shows include Water Way, Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries at Clarkson University, Beacon, NY; five solo exhibitions titled Water Way at the Fischbach Gallery, NYC (2013, 2009, 2006, 2004, 2002); Deus/Virus: Transforming the Protease, Riverrun Gallery, Lambertville, NJ; and Transforming the HIV Protease, The Norbert Considine Gallery at Stuart Country Day School, Princeton, NJ. frederickafoster.com

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Fredericka Foster, Arctic Diptych Midnight Sun, 2017, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches; Covid 19 Drowning, 2021, oil on linen, 20 × 34 inches; Tree and Water, 2017, oil on canvas, 18 × 24 inches; Hudson River IX, 2007, oil on canvas, 42 x 64 inches; Himalayas Carved by Water, 2013, oil on canvas, 42 x 64 inches; below is portrait of the artist by Andrew Gladstone.

artnet Art World

paris cyan cian in collaboration with theShoreCo.'s Cameron Mitchell Ware (creative producer) and jeremy de'jon (AWAW EAG), theShore:in/SIGHT (2021), film. Photo Credit: Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee

Here Are the 14 Gripping, Change-Making Projects That Won Anonymous Was A Woman’s First Ever $250,000 Environmental Art Grants

The grant is designed to address the lack of existing support for environmental art.

Vittoria Benzine, August 24, 2022

A community project focused on soil health, an installation that brings queer artists to the streets of New Orleans, and an exhibition that interrogates Brownsville, Texas’s rebranding as a SpaceX “space city” are among the projects awarded funding as part of the first ever Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants.

The program—an offshoot of the long-running Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) grant initiative—is a partnership with New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and offers a onetime grant of up to $20,000 to 14 female-led, impact-driven environmental art projects in the U.S. Awardees hail from locations ranging from Puerto Rico to the Pacific Northwest and explore climate change through performance, magic, mycology, fashion design, and more.

Read full article on Artnet here

Image Detail: "WE ARE HERE/ESTAMOS AQUI" (Michelle Glass) featuring Epifania Salazar, Francisca Rangel, Juanita Garza, Monse Rodriquez, Luz Maria Sosa, Photo Credit: Natalie Zajac

$250,000 Awarded to 14 Projects Led by Women-Identifying Artists in the United States and U.S. Territories.

Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) and The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) have announced the recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants (AWAW EAG) program, which provides one-time grants of up to $20,000 to support environmental art projects led by women-identifying artists nationwide. The program awarded a total of $250,000 in funding to artists from states and territories including California, Kansas, Louisiana, New York, Puerto Rico (Borikén), and Texas. Selected projects use a range of media to address soil, air, and water pollution; colonialism and its environmental and human impact; and climate change issues including coastal erosion—many which directly involve and engage affected communities.

Image Detail: digital artwork by Autumn Leiker

The AWAW EAG program supports environmental art projects that inspire thought, action, and ethical engagement. The intended impact of the project was an important factor in the selection process. The applications were reviewed by an esteemed panel comprising Patricia Watts, founder/curator of ecoartspace; Angie Tillges, Great River Passage Fellow, City of Saint Paul, MN; and Alicia Grullón, conceptual multimedia artist, educator, and organizer. Each of the selected projects will have a public engagement component which will be completed by June 2023. See below for more on each of the selected projects:

Continue reading on the NYFA website/blog, here

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

August 22, 2022

This week we recognize Hugh Pocock   Hugh Pocockand his thirty year career engaging with the dynamics of natural and cultural phenomena.

Pocock seeks to integrate the intersections of labor, industry and organic materials, such as water, air, salt, wood and earth. He is interested in the history and metaphor of the human relationship to natural resources, space, time, consumerism, art, energy and language, which he investigates through his sculptures, installations, performances and videos.

Living With A Log (above) was created in 1998, in Ashland, Oregon, and consisted of a 2.5 ton, 42 foot log that was placed inside of a residential home. Daily activities of cooking, eating, sleeping, working and socializing were conducted alongside of the Log.

Pocock's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums including Portikus Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, the Wexner Museum, the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. He has also built “non-art sites” for private homes, movie theatres and farms.

Drilling A Well For Water (above) was drilled in the Levi Sculpture Garden of the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2003. This activity was performed live during museum hours. The well reached the water table at 40 feet and a hand pump was installed. The 350 gallons of water from the well was added to the museum's heating and cooling system where it is permanently recycled to create both hot and cold air. This process produced the object Volume which is the volumetric space of the entire museum building.

This Garden, making salt and evaporation drawings (below) was performed at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2004. Seawater was collected and evaporated to produce salt in the Project Room. The salt was dried, bottled and given away to museum visitors. An Evaporation Drawing was made to mark the time and atmospheric conditions unique to the site for the duration of the exhibition.

No Man’s Land (below) is a proposal for a permanent park for the Non-Humans that Pocock conceived in 2018. The project is ongoing.

"No Man’s Land will be an area of land where humans are prohibited from entering. It is a space where the plants, animals, insects and fungi will have full and sole autonomy. Where they are free from the presence of human beings. The park will not be used for research or organized observation. It is not a place for humans to study or 'enjoy' nature. No tagging, recording, research or human technology of any kind is permitted in No Man’s Land. While it is recognized that Humans are a part of the earth’s ecology, NML is proposed to be a legally protected place where the Non-Humans are guaranteed to be free of the presence of Humans and their actions.

Legal Goals: No Man’s Land is both a physical and a legal space. The legal goal of the project is to establish the living ecology that is within NML as a recognized Legal Entity. Identifying it as a place that can never be interfered with by human acts of possession. This will be done through Trusts, Deeds, local ordinance or another legal device that is to be determined."

Hugh Pocock      was born in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and raised in the United States, England and Aotearoa. Time, energy, climate change, social connectivity and the Rights of Nature are among the issues he has investigated and continues to explore. Over the past three decades, he has shown his work in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Santa Fe and Baltimore as well as internationally in the former Soviet Union, Germany and China. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and then completed his MFA at UCLA in New Genres. Pocock is a faculty member at  Maryland Institute College of Art where he is the founding Coordinator of the Minor in Sustainability and Social Practice and the Studio Major titled "Ecosystems, Sustainability and Justice." He teaches Sculpture, Video and Social Practice courses that focus on the impact of Climate Change and issues of Sustainability. He is also Co-Facilitator of the Global Ecologies Studio taught annually at the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland.  Pocock lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. hughpocock.com  IG@hughpocockstudio 

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Hugh Pocock, Untitled, 1995, Warner Studios, Los Angeles, glass, soil, Caucasian flesh toned paint; Living With A Log, 1998, Ashland, Oregon; Drilling A Well For Water, 2003, Levi Sculpture Garden, Baltimore Museum of Art; This Garden, making salt and evaporation drawings, 2004, Santa Monica Museum of Art, California; No Man’s Land, 2018- present, proposal for a permanent park for the Non-Humans; photograph of the artist, links to a recent symposium presentation on No Man's Land during the artists' solo exhibition at Burren College of Art, Ireland, June 20 - July 22, 2022.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

August 15, 2022

This week we recognize Catherine Chalmers and her twenty plus year career collaborating with nature.

"I refer to myself as an artist. But, perhaps it’s more accurate to say I’m part of an art collective. I never work alone. My colleagues just don’t happen to be human. Early on I raised my collaborators in the studio, fed them, housed them. The dialogue was between me and the cockroach, me and the praying mantis. But, with the Leafcutters project, the exchange is between me and millions of wild ants."

"My work is at the intersection of art, science and nature.  I do extensive research for each of my long-term, multimedia projects and a direct engagement with the natural world is central to my what I do. My work aims to give form to the richness, as well as the brutality and indifference that often characterize our relationship with animals."

"I use the narrative possibilities of the visual arts to bridge the increasing rift between humanity and the ecosystem and to creatively engage with the systems that support life on earth.  Our culture is far richer with the inclusion of other life forms."

"I’ve worked with a variety of media, from engineering to painting, photography, video, sculpture and drawing, yet my artistic career has been focused on one central issue, how to confront and challenge our anthropocentric point of view.  Humanity has been drawing lines in the sand forever, defining what is in and what is out, maybe now, at the dawn of the Anthropocene, is a good time to reconsider those lines and what lives on the other side."

For her upcoming exhibition We Rule (below), opening at the Drawing Center in New York, October 2022, Chalmers will create a site-specific drawing installation in the lower-level gallery and corridor that depicts the underground labyrinth of an ant colony. The installation is inspired by the artist's observation of, and engagement with more than one dozen colonies of Leafcutter Ants on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. Over a ten-year period, Chalmers returned annually to the same spot, filming, photographing, and tracking the fate of these colonies. Leafcutter Ants are a metaphor for humanity’s life on earth: they farm, communicate, and collaborate; they also colonize, battle, and destroy.

Catherine Chalmers   holds a B.S. in Engineering from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. She has exhibited her artwork around the world, including MoMA P.S.1; MASSMoCA; Kunsthalle Vienna; Today Art Museum, Beijing; among others. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, ArtNews and Artforum. Chalmers has been featured on PBS, CNN, NPR, and the BBC. Two books have been published on her work: FOOD CHAIN (Aperture 2000) and AMERICAN COCKROACH (Aperture 2004). Her video “Safari” received a Jury Award (Best Experimental Short) at SXSW Film Festival in 2008. In 2010 Chalmers received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2015 she was awarded a Rauschenberg Residency. In 2018, she created a course called Art & Environmental Engagement, which she taught that spring quarter at Stanford University. Her video “Leafcutters” won Best Environmental Short at the 2018 Natourale Film Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany and in 2019, won the Gil Omenn Art & Science Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She lives in New York City. catherinechalmers.com

Featured Images: ©Catherine Chalmers, TREE, Northeastern Cherry, 2008, 11 feet tall, Boise Art Museum; Food Chain Series (praying mantis); Food Chain, 2000, installation at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Idols and Offerings Series: PORTRAIT, pigment print, 30 x 45 inches; Leaf Cutter Ant drawings, 2022, pen and ink on paper; the artist with E.O. Wilson, 2012 (below).

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

August 8, 2022

This week we recognize Blue McRight and  Blue McRighher dedication to the elimination of plastic pollution and the protection of our oceans.

"My world of artmaking is deeply immersive. I cross the wires of intention and chance to see what will happen, and the resulting shock rings me like a bell. I am struck, hollowed out, reverberating, transfixed until interrupted by dinner or some other distraction, whereupon my reaction is and always will be “five more minutes.” I am dedicated to creating a visual, metaphoric language about water and the ocean, synthesizing years of witnessing the undersea wilderness as a scuba diver. In ways that are provocative, but more poetic than didactic, my work engages with major environmental issues including drought, sea level rise and ocean plastic pollution."

"The organic processes of life behaviors, gender fluidity, reproduction, and death in marine creatures and their environments inspire me. These processes are timeless, unsentimental; outside of humans’ shifting cultural and political values. They continue with or without us. I trust their beauty, their indifference, their violence and integrity."

"Like an octopus, each of my arms has its own brain. The thoughts in my hands guide me: knotting and tying, cutting, sewing, and binding, I make each sculpture in cycles of repetition and improvisation. I utilize fishing nets, fish and crab traps, and bait baskets; though porous, they carry the weight of phantoms. They speak to life, death, struggle, capture, escape, despair, longing, and elation. They enable my formal and narrative exploration of transparency, weight and weightlessness, color, texture, and volume."

"My mind is in the gutter; constantly looking for plastic straws and lids in the street and on the beach. Along highways and at gas stations, I gather fallen urban fruit from the filthy orchard of our consumer culture. I insist that plastic trash such as salvaged nets, rope, straws, lids and other objects can be beautiful as material for artwork, forcing us to confront the possibilities of what we thoughtlessly discard, giving agency to the rejected as it assumes space in the realm of cultural dialogue, alluding to what is overlooked and wasted."

"The ultimate meaning of my work resides in engaging viewers while remaining elusive, in making personal and poetic connections to the conflict between nature and a culture of consumption. It speaks to our present era of the Anthropocene. It makes no predictions as to its outcome." Click image above for video interview

Blue McRight's      work explores the psychological and cultural terrain between nature, personal experience, and politics. She creates works that include found objects such as vintage nozzles and sprinklers, rubber hoses, faucets, and used books as well as natural ephemera such as trees and tree branches. The objects undergo transformative operations that abstract them while enhancing their realist core. McRight studied at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1974 to 1975 and the Evergreen State College from 1977 to 1979. She began exhibiting in the early 1980s and has been included in numerous group shows including at the Delaware Art Museum, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. The artist has received public sculpture commissions from the City of Ventura, Culver City, Los Angeles, San Buenaventura and San Diego, all in the state of California.  McRight has received grants from the Santa Fe Arts Council, and her work is included in the public collections of Sun America in New York, the Port of Portland in Oregon, Chemical Bank in New York, the Delaware Art Museum, Mountain Bell in Colorado, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Palm Springs Arts Museum. She lives and works in Venice, California.  bluemcright.com

Featured Images: ©Blue McRight, The Invisible Obvious, 2021, studio installation, mixed media, dimensions variable; Antigone/Drink Me: Siren, 2014, mixed media, 60 x 111 inches; Quench: Well Wisher, 2012, mixed media, 50 x 43 x 29 inches; Fathom, 2020, installation including salvaged ocean plastics, lids, nets, rope and objects, dimensions variable; Font, 2016, used books, rubber hoses, vintage brass faucets and sprinklers, wood and metal, installation for COLA Individual Artist Fellowship exhibition, 9 x 12 x 15 feet; Still image of artist taken from COLA video interview 2016 (below).