December 2023 e-Newsletter for subscribers is here

Deep Horizons: A Multisensory Archive of Ecological Affects and Prospects

The specifics of ecological destruction often take a cruel turn, affecting those who can least resist its impacts and who are least responsible for it. Deep Horizons: A Multisensory Archive of Ecological Affects and Prospects gathers contributions from multiple disciplines to investigate intersectional questions of how the changing planet affects specific peoples, communities, wildlife species, and ecosystems in varying and inequitable ways. A multisensory, artistic-archival supplement to the University of Colorado Boulder’s 2020-2022 Mellon Sawyer Environmental Futures Project, the volume enriches current conversations by bridging the environmental humanities and affect theory with insights from Native and Indigenous philosophies. It highlights artistic practices that make legible the long-term durational effects of ecological catastrophe, inviting readers and viewers to consider the emotional resonance of poems, nonfiction texts, sound-texts, photographs, and other artworks that grapple with the less visible loss and prospects of environmental transformation. 

Learn more about the book, which includes work by Erika Osborne, here

Entanglement and the Inner Feminine as Artistic Practice

Hillary Irene Johnson | October 19, 2023 on MAHB

Now that I am deep into the final year of my MFA in Photography at Columbia College Chicago, I find I’m reflecting on the problematic nature, the constraining potential of what the rational, well-ordered, intellectual, academic, rectilinear, traditionally masculine modes of thinking, doing and making. I am also researching models of success both out in the world and from an interior perspective. I wonder how I (and others if they like) might reframe experience and path from these masculine modes and views of success to those more feminine in nature, more internal processes, heroine’s journeys of transformation for the good of myself, for the good of all beings. 

I’m thinking a lot about entanglement, of our collective dilemmas and how we might move forward, borrowing Donna Harroway’s notion of a new period we have the potential to enter into, what she calls the Chthulucene. In her book, Staying with the Trouble (1), she writes:

“Chthulucene is a simple word. It is a compound of two Greek roots (khthôn and kainos) that together name a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth. Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, for freshness. Nothing in kainos must mean conventional pasts, presents, or futures. There is nothing in times of beginnings that insists on wiping out what has come before, or, indeed, wiping out what comes after. Kainos can be full of inheritances, of remembering, and full of comings, of nurturing what might still be. I hear kainos in the sense of thick, ongoing presence, with hyphae infusing all sorts of temporalities and materialities.”

Continue reading on MAHB here

The UN/making Network: An Interdisciplinary Artist-run Platform that Celebrates the UN/making of Harm

Jill Price | September 28, 2023

Arising out of personal observations about how the art world contributes to the Anthropocene, which Dr. Natalie Loveless from the University of Alberta defines as a colonial, industrial capitalist, patriarchal and petrol phenomenon that I would add is made exponential by the globalization of Western thought that privileges economic growth and individual wealth over ecological justice and social equity, the UN/making Network is an assemblage of online platforms that support and promote interdisciplinary art forms that push beyond the production of objects for commodification and consumption and uptake methods of performativity to assist in the care and repair of ecological sites and spaces that support human and more-than-human well-being. 

Formulated as a research-creation Ph.D. project in which I was interested in discovering and developing ways in which to unmake myself from systems of harm as a consumer and a maker, as well as transition my personal practice away from the narrative towards that which could be considered performative, preventative or reparative, the UN/making Network is Inspired by other artivist or cultural websites that work to share eco-ethical mandates, resources, and outcomes, and build a community of like-minded thinkers and doers. Temporarily housed under www.jillpricestudios.ca, the UN/making Network currently exists as a series of web pages that:

Continue reading on MAHB here

Lucia Monge Collaborates With Living Organisms for While a Leaf Breathes (Mientras una Hoja Respira)

The ArtYard exhibition explores plant respiration as a metaphor for life and vulnerability. On view through January 28 in Frenchtown, New Jersey.

ArtYard November 8, 2023

To create works for While a Leaf Breathes (Mientras una Hoja Respira), artist Lucia Monge turned to plants, mushrooms, bacteria, and other living organisms as collaborators. 

“The materials in my works are prepared, fermented, cooked, and cultivated,” Monge says. “It is hard and also beautiful to adapt to another species’ temporality. It is important for me to not only talk about interspecies relationships but to try to meet another species halfway and to have my practice be guided through their cycles, time, and urgencies.”

The exhibition explores stomata — the pores through which plants breathe. Exchanging air with the environment is key to the photosynthetic process of plants. However, every time these pores open to breathe, the plant risks losing water. There is vulnerability in opening up, and loss and nourishment must be balanced in order to stay alive.

Continue reading at Hyperallergic here

November 2023 e-Newsletter for subscribers is here

Photo: A Oyster Mushroom fruits through one of Carol Padberg’s handwoven wearable sculptures.

Carol Padberg's fully integrated art and educational practice

Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein

Carol Padberg lives her practice. Through a combination of material work creation and a back-to-the-land, spiritually integrated lifestyle, the artist/educator is fully entrenched in her mission. Padberg was the founder of the low residency Nomad MFA program through the Hartford Art School at University of Hartford (2015) and along with Mary Mattingly, appling the Nomad curricular model also recently founded the Confluence MFA concentration (2022) at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. This unique regenerative culture program integrates multiple sites in the Americas with a focus on both ecology and community. View her TED talk here for more information: Radical: Art, Education and Ecology | Carol Padberg | TEDxUniversityofHartford

Interview

Carol, a word that comes to mind when exploring your work is: connection. Whether the connection is between fiber and living organisms and/or people and the planet, the weavings you present seem to be both literal and abstract manifestations of this interconnectedness. What drives the dedication to develop and promote these connections?

We are living in a time that has been devastated by the myth of separability. Yet we are all connected. My efforts in raising sheep and weaving, my commitment to work with mycelia and indigo, all of it is driven by the need to return to non-extractive economies, ancestral practices, and a direct, interspecies connection to the web of life. So, yes, ‘connection’ is a key concept for me. It is essential to understand this word within the ecological, political and cultural context of this destructive myth of separability. Another way the idea of connection shows up in my work is that the mycelial sculptures I make decompose back into the soil of the dye gardens. This way the life cycle of the art is directly connected to the life cycles of the planet.

Photo: A slug eats one of Carol Padberg’s decomposing mycelial sculptures, accelerating the release of nutrients and mycelia back to the soil (2018).

A huge aspect of challenging separability and a necessity in connection is intimacy. In “Meeting Mycelia” (2019) and the “Mycelial Muse Kit” (2022) you explore deep emotional and nurturing relationships with natural growth and cycles. How does the relationship between human and earth develop through these processes?

A human being is an interspecies being. We have more non-human DNA in our bodies than human DNA. This is thanks to the bacterial and fungal communities that keep us healthy in our gut, on our skin and in ways we have not yet scientifically named. So, interspecies intimacy is “built-in” to mammals like us. When you consider this deep interspecies reality, it can be surprising that we need to pause to remember this. Yet here we are, with our idea of individuality, which is a biological fallacy. I want to trouble this idea of ‘appreciating nature’ by completely breaking down the human/nature binary. We must undo this idea that we are separate from nature. Art that creates a direct experience of our skin’s mycelial community to the mycelial community of the forest floor is not only poetic, but useful. This art has the ability to remind us to listen with our cells, loosen our grasp on individual selfhood and build new neural pathways that may foster better ways of knowing.

Photo: Carol Padberg's spun wool from her sheep, created on a 17th century walking wheel.

And you practice what you preach: your regenerative practice has expanded beyond artistic production and has become a way of life for you at the Nook Farm House. What role does place hold in your socially-engaged environmental art practice?

In the past sixteen months I moved from Nook Farm House on the east coast of Turtle Island to Tewa land in the Southwestern region, to bring the Confluence curriculum to the University of New Mexico. All last year I felt bereft leaving Nook Farm House in Hartford, and yet it continues in new forms. Now I live on a farm in Northern New Mexico where I have a workshare arrangement in exchange for lodging. I raise wool sheep here and they graze on the grasses of this apple orchard. I also grow indigo to contribute to the local fibershed. I am fortunate to live in an area with abundant textile traditions: from the Pueblo peoples, the Diné, and the descendants of Hispanic settlers. I am a student of this place: observing, listening and growing as I adapt. And I am being shaped by the tenacious and fragile high desert. In my mycelial practices I have begun working with the Oyster Mushrooms I meet in the Jemez Mountains. And I am also beginning a project that considers the Questa Mine Superfund site and questions conventional ideas about remediation. As most of the materials I use as an artist come from the place where I live, a change in location brings new possibilities and requires adding new skills. So I am in a time of adaptation, and this is invigorating.

Photo: A participant in a Meeting Mycelia workshop feeling the mycelia of fruiting Oyster Mushrooms through his eyelids (2020)

In the spirit of creating this bridge, you have been incorporating new growth (mycelia) into textiles in recent years. How do these living woven cloths relate meaning to this inseparability?

This is an ontological question, and by that I mean it relates to how we know what is. Let’s get mystical for a moment… One of the ways I walk in the world is as an animist who participates in old ways that have been carried down from my deepest human ancestors. I am from descendants of settler colonists on both sides of my family. But before we were colonized and trained into colonialism, we were living in Northern Europe and practicing a belief system in which weaving was world making. The three fates wove past, present and future. By collaborating with Oyster mushroom mycelia, who create by metabolizing rotting wood, I am considering how to process my family history and the trauma we have created in the world. How do we digest this? I practice spinning and weaving on ancestral wheels and looms as a way to reconnect with my heritage and then I work with mycelia because they are the best teachers of metabolization. How do we weave a future from this time period we have been born into? I believe textiles and mycelia hold clues.

Photo: Sheep grazing near Carol Padberg’s Ger (Yurt) on the Northern New Mexico apple orchard where she lives, October 2023.

Photo: A selection from the book Otra Visión: Mujeres Que Tejen, created by students in the Confluence MFA in collaboration with the Mujeres Que Tejen Weaving Collective in Valle de Teotitlán, Oaxaca, México, 2023.

Your work is both in practice and in education. The MFA programs you have developed have been called “the MFA of the future”. What inspired you to develop these novel models?

I deeply believe in the power of education to change lives and shape our world for the better. A democracy requires relevant, varied, and thoughtful educational institutions. In terms of the Confluence MFA, we are proud to be part of a state university that serves a majority POC student body. The leadership at the University of New Mexico is forward thinking, and adaptive to the changing conditions we are living in. Are we the MFA of the future? I think when people tell us that, what they are noticing is that we are purpose-driven, holistic, and that we have a low-residency format that is practical for working adults. An MFA dedicated to regenerative culture is a niche MFA. It serves a very specific need. There is no one MFA for the future, thank goodness. As the program will soon be ten years old, I would say it is going well. We are continuing to evolve a curriculum that gives students an expanded toolkit with which to address the world’s most complex issues. We attempt to do this in a way that is trauma-informed, liberatory and engaged. Is it easy work? No. Is it meaningful? Absolutely!

Confluence MFA Online Openhouse, info here.

Photo: MFA students with teaching artists Mark Dion and Christy Gast in the Everglades, Florida, 2018.

Thank you, Carol, for expanding our horizons with your ideas and practice!

Lauren Bon on site at Bending The River, 2023 (photo courtesy Metabolic Studio)

The Artist Working to Reclaim the LA River’s Water

Through adaptive reuse, environmental artist Lauren Bon is diverting water from the river and distributing it to the Los Angeles State Historic Park.

Matt Stromberg September 12, 2023

LOS ANGELES — Since 1960, nearly all of the 51-mile Los Angeles River has flowed within a concretized channel. It begins in the San Fernando Valley at the intersection of Bell Creek and Arroyo Calabasas, then moves east through Studio City, curves around Griffith Park, and heads south past Glendale, Downtown LA, and the Gateway Cities of Vernon, Bell, and Maywood before emptying into the San Pedro Bay in Long Beach. Its stark, industrial shores have served as a backdrop for Hollywood films (Grease, Point Blank, Drive) and a fishing spot for intrepid urban hunters. What the river does not provide Angelenos is water, which its concrete shell ensures is channeled directly into the Pacific: 207 million gallons per day, according to the City of LA. 

Through an ambitious project titled “Bending the River” (2012–ongoing), environmental artist Lauren Bon and her Metabolic Studio are working to reclaim at least a small portion of that water.

“This is the first adaptive re-use of LA River infrastructure,” Bon told Hyperallergic. “This work acts as a case study. My hope is to set a precedent and path forward for creative and innovative thinking about how we can better use our infrastructure and re-evaluate our commons of soil, seed, water, and community process.”

Continue reading on Hyperallergic here

Patricia Johanson (American, born 1940) Fair Park Lagoon, 1981–86, Gunite, native plants, and animal species, Dimensions variable. For the People, the Meadows Foundation, Communities Foundation of Texas, Texas Commission on the Arts and their private and corporate donations. Permanently sited in Fair Park, Dallas. © Patricia Johanson, Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Michael Barera

Groundswell: Women of Land Art

Sue Spaid

Published October 1 for AEQAI

Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

On view through January 7, 2024

A couple of years ago, I unearthed a disappointing story. Between 1971 and 1990, as earthworks gave way to eco-art, twelve museums mounted exhibitions focused on eco-art, which featured artworks by a total of 238 men and 25 women, even though women actually built half of the fifty early examples of ecological earthworks. Moreover, dozens of women participated in the Land art movement, yet the very notion of women creating Land art, which typically requires heavy machinery, specialized skills, and expensive materials, still astonishes fifty years later. Thanks to Anna Mendieta’s well-publicized career, more women are known for their ecologically-oriented performance art. Seven first generation eco-artists are among the twelve artists featured in “Groundswell: Women of Land Art.” Since museums have historically ignored women’s vital contribution to this field, an exhibition focused entirely on women artists only seems fair. “Groundswell” offers a historical context for Patricia Johanson’s Fairpark Lagoon, a massive remediation project commissioned by the Dallas Museum of Art in the early 1980s to revitalize the lagoon sited three miles southeast of the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Continue reading on AEQAI here

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

October 2, 2023

This week we recognize David Cass David Cass, and his painting practice focused on climate change, rising sea levels and waters. 

Cass creates three-dimensional paintings and installations using exclusively found materials sourced at flea-markets and antique fairs; though his practice also involves photography, digital media, writing, sculpture and curation. He has made responsible travel a key component of his practice, as well as his exhibition activities.

 click images for more info

Rising Horizon is a series of paintings in oil, with each work exploring aspects of our changing Earth: from commentary on rising sea levels, to the importance of re-using and recycling materials. These works, including Slides and Sounds, 2017-2018 (above) have been exhibited during solo shows at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh and at Taigh Chearsabhagh Arts Centre in North Uist. They’ve also featured in a range of group events, including Royal Academy and Royal Scottish Academy Open exhibitions. During 2020, these works were presented as part of Scotland’s Year of Coasts & Waters.

"Discovering the opportunities we have within reach for combatting aspects of the climate crisis also lies at the core of Where Once the Waters (above). Here, the aim has been to invite people to reflect, on their own terms, upon the changes happening at places we may feel some connection to. I believe that we have a better chance of engaging with aspects of climate change if we can do this in a personal way. In this vein, in May 2022, I opened a small solo exhibition—principally discussing the topic of rising sea levels—at the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale. The exhibition comprised two installation artworks formed of many small parts. One group of Letters (typed antique papers addressed to people around the world) offered readers insights into our changing coastlines; while a group of miniature seascapes spoke of sustainability and the need to care for our resources. Over the course of its display, Where Once the Waters was well received by visitors and media, with regular exhibition tours and discussions."   You can also take part

"So far over 600 Letters have been typed onto an assortment of found papers, addressed to people around the world, each offering a sea-level “reading.” These letters aren’t sent (at least not in their physical form), they’re added to a growing collection. A Letter to Rhea, 2022 (below) was enlarged and presented in billboard format in Brooklyn, New York, thanks to the I AM WATER campaign (ecoartspace/our humanity matters); a Letter to Mesi was digitally screened during COP27 in Egypt thanks to IkonoTV. This is a different way to present the information the letters contain, specifically addressed to locals. If we know what is happening locally, we stand a better chance of meeting that issue. Climate change shouldn’t feel “far off” and issues such as sea-level rise could impact us all, regardless of where we live. We need to be discussing this more."

“I started a series of seascapes (below) in the summer of 2022, after having spent the three previous years working almost exclusively on a small scale. Here, I’ve gradually applied expressive layers of oil in abstract shapes onto vintage industrial canvases and large format nautical maps pasted to board. Like the telling and re-telling of a story, I’ve traced and re-traced loops and curves, following familiar channels to build thick swells of paint. These paintings see my mark-making style inverted, with more emphasis placed on the negative space. Suggestive of sustainable practices, the titles of these paintings possess a meditative quality, much like the layering process of their creation.”

David Cass     is an artist and occasional curator working between the UK and Europe. He has exhibited his multidisciplinary artwork in a range of venues and festivals including group showings at Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, MAXXI Museum in Rome, The Royal Academy (London) and Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh), and solo presentations at The Scottish Gallery, British Institute of Florence and Venice Biennale. Upon graduation from Edinburgh College of Art's School of Drawing & Painting, Cass received a Royal Scottish Academy scholarship to Italy. This event had great influence on his practice and his current projects still make reference to the country. He has participated in projects worldwide, and has artworks in numerous collections, both public and private. These activities have had an increasing focus on sustainability and the environment, with recent projects centered around on the issue of rising sea levels. Among other awards, Cass has received Winsor & Newton’s top award for his projects in watercolour and the Royal Scottish Academy’s Benno Schotz prize. He’s provided illustrations for books by Mark Haddon (2019) and Claudia Roden (2021) and worked collaboratively on the curatorial project A La Luz, which he co-founded with artist Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar Romero.  In 2024, he will present his tenth solo exhibition.

Featured images (top to bottom): ©David Cass,     So Many Endings, 2011–2013, objects + offcuts, gouache, 66 x 76 x 14cm; Sounds or Slides, 2017–2018, 35mm slides, oil, 5 x 5cm; Where Once the Waters, Series I + II, Venice, 2022; Letter to Rhea, I AM WATER billboard, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, 39th Street & 4th Avenue, photography by Juan Cuartas Rueda; Recount, 2022–2023, mixed media on bus blind, 130 x 80cm; portrait of the artist.