(DFA 186: Hadēs. 2012. Unique digital-C print on watercolor paper. Cleared and stained Pacific tree frog collected in Aptos, California in scientific collaboration with Stanley K. Sessions. 46 x 34 in. )

Creating Fertile Soil In the Face of Loss:
Brandon Ballengée on his Art, Research and Activism
Interviewed by Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein


Brandon Ballengée is an incredible artist, scientist and activist whose work has consistently revolved around endangered species awareness and habitat rehabilitation. His work spans from interactive sculpture to educational environments to community and environmental activism, as well as collage, photography and painting alongside his research. He has recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work in the Gulf of Mexico where communities meet to create, learn and strategize solutions to one of the USA’s largest natural disasters.

(Collapse. Installed at National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, 2014. Mixed-media installation including 26,162 preserved specimens representing 370 species. Glass, Preffer and Carosafe preservative solutions. 12 x 15 x 15 feet. In collaboration with Todd Gardner, Jack Rudloe, Brian Schiering and Peter Warny. Photo by J.D. Talasek.)


Hi Brandon, thank you so much for your time!

Endangered species has been a theme of your work throughout your career. You create awareness for 10s of thousands of species that are disappearing using an array of methods, both creative and scientific. How do you balance and respond to this theme using these different perspectives?
 
We are in the middle of a mass extinction event, referred to as the Anthropocene or Sixth great extinction. Here, many familiar species, like frogs, turtles, butterflies, and bumblebees are disappearing… and rapidly. We have lost over forty percent of amphibians and more than half the planet’s overall wildlife since I have been alive. The renowned scientist and environmental philosopher Edward O. Wilson has even described this era as the Eremozoic (eremo coming from the Greek for lonely or bereft) or the ‘Age of Loneliness.’
 
My work responds to the extinction crisis through diverse media and actions. As an artist, I have continued to develop an aesthetic of ‘loss,’ giving a visual form to the growing absence of life on our rapidly degrading planet. As a scientist, I find it increasingly important to share research findings about such losses with the public. Through art, I am able to speculate future outcomes, question our current behaviors, express my concerns as well as mourn. As a biologist, I must remain analytical and report unbiased information on species found within or missing from ecosystems.
 
Combined, art and science are complementary ways of trying to understand our world and ourselves, as well as a means to address the complex socio-ecological challenges we and other species currently face.

(Styx: Variation Vl. 2010. Parco Arte Vivente (PAV), Centro D'Arte Contemporanea, Torino, Italy. Mixed media installation with 9 cleared and stained Pacific treefrogs on sculptural light-box. In scientific collaboration with Stanley K. Sessions. Photograph by Valentina Bonomonte.)

This is my way of being an activist, an Ecosystem-Activist. I work to activate communities, perform participatory science, encourage artistic expression and infect with ideas,  and to concretely push back against habitat degradation, protect the remaining biodiversity and give means for it to regenerate.

Your statement of intent is a call for collaboration between disciplines especially in the arts and sciences. Have your experiences of interdisciplinary collaboration been fruitful? And what are some important things for collaborators between the artistic and scientific disciplines to keep in mind? What is are the important differences between multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary in your opinion?
 
No single discipline can ‘fix’ the milieu of challenges we currently face. My work with Louisiana communities over the past decade has taught me that art can be an important icebreaker for meeting residents and act as an olive branch with fisherfolk and oil workers, many of whom remain resistant to the concept of human caused environmental impact. At the same time, they are among those facing the greatest threat to their culture and livelihoods from climate change. Through pop-up exhibitions and participatory citizen science, I have been able to meet and recruit potential project participants, communicate my environmental concerns and learn about their perspectives, while brainstorming creative ideas towards survival.
 
This way of working involves both the utilization of artistic and scientific techniques. The art is often an expression derived from scientific research experiences with animals in natural or artificial conditions and often inspires new ideas for scientific studies. While conducting primary biological research, scientific methods and standards are rigorously followed, however new ideas for art often happens. All inspire and inform further conservation actions.

(Still from North Troy Eco-Action with Brandon Ballengée, 2014)

Through public programs, my Eco-Actions, I share both science and art methods with participants. This is my way of being an activist, an Ecosystem-Activist. I work to activate communities, perform participatory science, encourage artistic expression and infect with ideas,  and to concretely push back against habitat degradation, protect the remaining biodiversity and give means for it to regenerate. This mixed method begins as interdisciplinary, becomes multidisciplinary and perhaps moves towards transdisciplinarity where art, science and activism grow with a community into something else.
 
I think many people can relate to the Age of Loss and Loneliness. Perhaps the last year can lead to more awareness and respect for other species. What can the audience do to stop so many species from being endangered or does the issue lie in necessary changes to big industry?
 
We are the change. The actions we take every day shape the environments around us, the ecosystems around us, the species around us. What we're choosing to consume, how we're transporting ourselves to different places, what we're doing in our back yard or on our rooftop, or not doing - all of these actions have an impact, and they can be very positive. By using the creative side of art, science, and just being individual human beings working together, we have this remarkable ability to restore environments and help them and other species. Life wants to persist if we let it. Which in turn helps us, too.
 
Following this concept, my family (my wife Aurore Ballengée and our children Victor and Lilith) and I began the Atelier de la Nature. In 2016, we purchased heavily farmed land in rural south Louisiana and have worked to regenerate the ecosystems from a GMO monoculture into a nature reserve and outdoor education center.
 
Through sculpting the lands with specialized native species (helping to break-down pesticide residue and deter erosion), we are working to reestablish ‘Cajun’ prairie (ecosystems found here prior to modernity), planted over 1300 regional native trees (to regrow a forest), created wetlands (habitats for declining amphibians and rare fishes), created pollinator habitats from native hibiscus, swamp milkweed, and many more regional plants (to aid declining butterflies, like the Monarch which is in on the verge of endangered, native bees and others) and traditionally grow food without pesticides using permaculture, Creole and other indigenous methods.

 

Atelier de la Nature is also a community space, whereby we offer combined environmental education, sustainable food and art events open to all ages. We hold nature summer camp for youth, art and nature festivals for families and have started an artist, and/ or scientist residency program.
 
Atelier de la Nature project has already yielded results in the ecological sense with many dozens of species of birds and mammals returning (and breeding), amphibians and reptiles currently occupying the property, countless insects, all coming back to once barren land. In the human communal sense, hundreds of youth have helped with restoration of the lands youth or participated in our programs, a thousands have attended our festivals!
 
I am interested in honoring, remembering, creating an emotional connection with lost species to inspire actions that help to restore ecosystems and save species.

(Love Motel for Insects: Anax Junius Variation. Smithsonian National Zoological Park, Washington DC, USA. Summer 2012. Outdoor installation and Eco-Actions (public field-trips) with: Black Ultra-violet lights, steel, fabric, native plants, invited insects. Overall dimensions 5.5 by 9 meter. Photographs by Lindsay Wallace and Brandon Ballengée.)

That’s beautiful! So many species are affected by human-made constructions (like monocultures in agriculture), and, as you rightfully say, the potential for change lies in our hands. In much of your work you document species passing, and you seem to give voice and representation to the lost species. How much of your goal is to create a “haunting” awareness of the destruction, and how much of your goal is honoring and preserving the evidence of human-caused environmental effects?
 
The work is not about preserving or documenting destruction. Instead, I am interested in honoring, remembering, creating an emotional connection with lost species to inspire actions that help to restore ecosystems and save species. I just see myself as a human being existing in a time of dire socio-environmental crisis, who tries to do something about it, by any means available to me. In ecosystem terms, we are all hearing Nero’s fiddle as our planetary home burns and species diversity rapidly dwindles. I navigate and try to make sense of this enigmatic traumatic terrain utilizing the analytical methods of a scientist while also trying to understand and express this reality in visual terms as an artist.

(RIP Hare-Indian Dog: After John Woodhouse Audubon. 1949/2014. Artist cut and burnt print hand-colored stone lithograph, etched glass urn, and ashes. 13 5/8 x 16 inches. Species last observed 1800s. Photo by Casey Dorobek.)

That makes sense and I think it is working. Let’s talk about your practice. Do you have any rituals you perform honor the lost species during your process?
 
Ritual is at the core of my series, Frameworks of Absence. With the Frameworks, I acquire original historic prints picturing now vanished animals and printed at the period when the depicted species became extinct (ranging from the 16th to 21st Century). These original artifacts are then altered by physically cutting the image of the animal from the print. For example, in RIP Labrador Duck: After John James Audubon (1856/2007), the image of the birds was removed from an original Audubon 1856 Royal Octavo (hand-colored by one of Audubon’s sons) printed at the same point in history as the actual species disappeared.
 
Another, recently completed work RIP Antioquia Beaked Frog: After Paula Andrea (2011/2014), responded to the loss of this amphibian over the past decade and was cut from a signed artist proof published in Columbia in 2011 (cut with the artists consent). Such altered prints are then framed with a glass backing, so that the wall is seen through the absence of the depicted animal, which gives form to the void left by these lost species. The process of researching the extinct animals, finding and acquiring historic depictions in an ongoing ritual for me. 

For this second component of the project, the cut animals from the prints are burned and placed in glass vessels etched with the species name. Participants are then asked to scatter these “remains” through their own private cremation ceremonies- a personal ritual of sorts, what I call Actions of Mourning. My intention here is to create an embodied transformative event, like the loss of a loved one and the scattering of their ashes, changes an individual for the duration of their life. In the case of these actions, my hope is to connect individuals to a lost species in the hope that this grief inspires them to help protect the biodiversity that remains.

 
 
(RIP Parrot Fish. 2014. Giclée print on handmade Japanese rice paper in an edition of 13. 18 by 24 inches each.)

Much of my work attempts to connect viewers with loss, and over the past two decades, through numerous trials using varied media.

These are such touching themes that have really come to the forefront this past year. Due to the pandemic, the human species has been confronted with death like it has not for generations. In your work, “Dying Tree” you amplify the sound of an ill tree dying for a museum audience. What do you think is a healthy relationship with death? And how can the empathy that death creates become a bridge between species?
 
The death of our friends, family, and ourselves is very hard for us to comprehend. Even further, the permanent loss of a group of organisms is an almost abstract idea. At a larger scale, occidental culture increasingly attempts to “buy” death away. I mean this in two ways, firstly through the preternatural extension of life for those that can afford such “medicine”. Secondly, under postwar capitalism we have been relentlessly trained to consume and accumulate to material goods. The idea that such possessions provide us with happier lives is a widely accepted illusion. Recent studies have shown evidence that individuals thinking about death often respond by going shopping. The COVID over-buying of last year is further evidence. However, if we do not think about loss, how do we grieve, accept or learn from it?

Dying Tree. Domaine de Chamarande, France. Summer 2012.

Much of my work attempts to connect viewers with loss, and over the past two decades, through numerous trials using varied media (such as empty specimen jars to represent changes in marine food-webs, drawn silhouettes of vanished animals, amplifying the sounds coming from a slowly dying tree, and others). I found that the cut artifacts in the Frameworks has a visceral quality that invokes an emotive response in viewers, sometimes anger but most often confusion followed by grief, it has been my successful attempt in translating species loss to others, translate the with the message of species loss. At another level the works question what we value and protect, our beloved depictions of nature or actual species and ecosystems. As conservationist Aldo Leopold once said, “We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses.”
 
From endangered sea turtles, to marine mammals, to plankton, deep-water alga, corals to birds to us- the spill reached the many tiers of the complex Gulf web and way of life.

(MIA Highfin Blenny. 2020. 22.5 by 32 inches. Mixed media with Deepwater Horizon source crude oil, Taylor/ MC20 source crude, contaminated marshland sediment with oil, anaerobic bacteria and iron oxide, and COREXIT 9500A (dispersant) on Arches hot press watercolor paper. Depicting United States National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) at the Smithsonian specimen USNM 164017 Highfin Blenny (male), Lupinoblennius nicholsi. *Species last reported in 2000.)

And, last but definitely on least, congratulations on your recent Guggenheim Fellowship! How does it feel and what do you have in store for the fellowship?
 
Thank you. I am very grateful. The Guggenheim Fellowship will support my continued project Searching for Ghosts of the Gulf, which responds to missing Gulf of Mexico species through visual artworks and actions with coastal Louisiana communities that are themselves culturally endangered.
 
For many of us, and over ten thousand other species, the Gulf of Mexico is a special place, our sanctuary, our home, our mother, provider and sometimes destroyer. As an artist I find her to be an inspirational source of color, form, intrigue, tranquility and fear. From the science side, the Gulf is among the most important and biologically diverse marine environments in the world. She is resilient, powerful, seductive but also dangerous, damaged and suffocating in her own sang noir (a regional term describing crude oil).
Land in coastal Louisiana is being lost at the fastest rate on Earth and, in recent decades, several Gulf species have gone missing. As habitats and biodiversity disappear, so do the cultures that rely on them. The fate of the Gulf’s children remains precarious.

Since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill, much of my work has focused on the perilous environmental state of the Gulf of Mexico. So much so that my family and I moved to south Louisiana from NYC in 2015, to be at the front lines so to speak.
 
DWH was the largest industrial petrochemical accident in modern history and its long-term impact on fishes, other biota and Gulf ecosystems is still not well understood. Additionally, there have been 2000+ smaller spills since DWH and, before then, the Taylor or MC20 oil spill began in 2004 and continues uninterrupted today. Through my installations, photographs, crude paintings and programs, I want to give visual form to loss from these environmental insults and inspire individual actions towards systemic change.

The Nature of Art (PBS) 2019

My work explores lens-based practice as a mode of representation allowing for poetic and critical  engagement with culturally charged sites of significance, as well as those presumed to be neutral.  The resulting imagery is at once metaphoric and banal, emphasizing the arbitrary relevance of the  distinct forms pictured. Combining a documentary approach with direct intervention, my process  incorporates multiple reproductive methods including digital imaging, film, and video. Sensitive to  the role of the camera in contributing to the proliferation of familiar, constructed images of  landscape, I made a deliberate decision in recent years to incorporate (potentially) less mediated  photographic processes including cyanotype prints and other UV-based contact exposure  methods. 

Working between and within the still and moving image, my projects examine the role of these  media in shaping personal and social understandings of our environment through site-responsive  engagement. Drawing on conventions of photography and cinema as emblematic of archived  experience, the premise of evidentiary authenticity is deliberately probed via found and fabricated  situations that are traced, replicated and transformed. Expansive presentation modes place  sequential and composite imagery in relation as imperfectly contiguous screen-based and print  forms, stressing the fragmentary nature of perceptual response. The ephemeral state implied by  the time-based recording of physical elements is distinct from the printed reproduction – a stable  frame that persists, suggesting all matter is sound enough to endure inevitable and relentless  shifts, however benign or catastrophic. This approach purposefully unravels our collective  understanding of the perceived world – and by extension, our struggle to orient ourselves within  a shared global space that is rapidly transforming.

-Dawn Roe

Mineral House Media: What is your history as an artist? Where did you first find your passion or inspiration to create? What brought to you where you are now?

Dawn Roe: Hmm…such a tough one. I didn’t necessarily grow up thinking I wanted to be an artist, but was always just pretty curious about the world, generally - lots of looking and thinking, and questioning from a young age, I guess. From my late teenage years to mid-twenties I took a pretty meandering path that eventually led me away from my home state of Michigan to Portland, Oregon where I would live for 10 years in the 1990s and end up completing my undergraduate degree in art at a small college with a really strong BFA program just outside Portland called Marylhurst. I found my way to Marylhurst via the Northwest Film Center where I was initially studying experimental cinema. They had a cooperative program with Marylhust, which worked out great for me. The faculty in both of these programs had a profound impact on me and remain mentors and friends.

That decade in Portland was a transformative time for me, and certainly shaped my ideas around art and artmaking. My formal education was juxtaposed with the DIY culture embedded in my shared community of punk and indie musicians, writers, zine makers - artists of every variety really. There was fantastic energy and joy, but there was a flipside as well. Many of us struggled with mental health and substance abuse issues, and there was loss along the way. During my final year of undergraduate study, I made the decision to leave Portland and began applying to grad school. As I was already 30 years old at the time, going right into grad school made sense for me, as I was eager to work with a new group of faculty and fellow artists and just really needed to leave Portland. This decision turned out to be the right one, as my three years in the Studio Art MFA program at Illinois State University were equally pivotal, bringing me to a healthier mental and physical space. It was here my focus shifted from working with photography in a more traditional, documentary style to a more expansive mode that led me to begin staging works and considering working with the moving image again.

MHM: What sort of music do you like to listen to? Does it directly inform the vocal sound components of some of your work?

DR: Like most people, it’s a pretty wide variety, but I do tend to veer between extremes - from intensely bombastic and scream-y to more somber, melancholy and melodic sorts. I worked in a somewhat infamous club in Portland for years called Satyricon, known for hosting punk and garage acts as well as indie singer/songwriters. A lot of what I listen to would have been played there, either live or on the jukebox - too many bands/people to list, really. But I’ve always listened to a lot of old soul music as well. And yes, all these things directly inform the vocal components of my work for sure. Portland musician and artist Rachel Blumberg contributed her beautiful voice to one of my video works, The Sunshine Bores | The Daylights, and a group of Portland musician friends (Jerry (A.) Lang; Jillian Wieseneck; Dan Eccles; Jennifer Shepard; Dean Miles) produced the audio components to my most recent project, Wretched Yew. Jen Shepard’s vocal track is a hugely vital piece to that video, including a blood curdling scream that gives me chills in the very best way every time I hear it.

To continue reading go HERE

Mineral House Media was founded in 2017 as an online curatorial collective focused on the enrichment of personal practice through the elevation of working contemporary artists. We strive to connect artists across the Southeast and beyond through a series of online residencies, interviews, podcasts, mini-documentaries, and annual exhibitions.

CAA 2021: 89 Panels Focused on the Climate Crisis

Submitted by Sue Spaid

According to the official conference schedule, CAA 2021 hosted 89 panels over 4 days that featured nearly 325 presenters addressing issues “including but going beyond eco-art and eco-criticism, with a special focus on climate justice and intersectional thinking as priorities.” I have attended conferences where it was imperative to read presenters’ papers in advance, but this was my first conference where I was expected to watch three to four 15-20 minute videotaped presentations in advance of each 30-minute panel discussion in order to intelligently discuss presenters’ talks. Crazier still, pre-recorded presentations came online less than a week before the first day, leaving those attendees particularly interested in the climate crisis just 168 hours to watch 108 hours of pre-recorded content to prepare for 89 half-hour sessions. For good, several climate crisis panels were booked simultaneously, so one need only prepare for the favored theme. Luckily, the pre-recorded talks and recorded discussions remained available through March 15, which meant that if one devoted five hours a day for the remaining 30 days, one could still catch 153 hours of recorded content. I did my best to view as much content as possible. According to CAA’s post-conference survey, the average attendee checked out the recorded talks associated with two panels.

Elsewhere I’ve characterized how centuries of colonialism aggravated species extinction, vulnerable essential workers, and the negligence that spurred the Black Lives Movement. Not only did numerous panels tie climate justice to the legacy of colonialism, in particular the violence harnessed to sustain environmentally-insensitive extractive industries; while others credit climate change with instigating radical pedagogies, cultural sustainability, multispecies co-authorship, intersectional approaches to ecology, geo-trauma, and mourning as a means of coping with ecological grief. Given the role played by place in shaping local cultures, beliefs, and values, it’s imperative that societies recognize how degraded environments destabilize cultural identities. Such a diverse range of panels painted climate justice as both product and a cause of widespread social ills.

Land acknowledgment statements typically honor indigenous peoples’ territories related to the in-person conference’s location. The first CAA 2021 panel I attended encouraged listeners to post the names of Indian tribes whose unceded lands they occupied, which truthfully inspired me for the first time in my life to investigate the Native Americans inhabiting Houston, my parental home since 1977. I eagerly typed in “Akokisa, a tribe associated with the Atakapa Indians,” known as the Atakapa-Ishak Nation. This was the first indication that a zoom meeting could prompt locals to discover local lore.

This conference provided an opportunity to explore the wealth of contemporary art being created by artists of Native American descent, such as David Boxley’s Tsimshian imagery, Dyani White Hawk’s paintings and beadwork inspired by Lakota quillwork, Oscar Howe’s dynamic casein and tempera paintings, James Johnson’s Tlingit carvings and dynamic skateboards, Courtney Leonard’s ongoing Breach project inspired by the Shinnecock Nation’s ancestral lands near Montauk, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie’s digital art. Participating art historians/curators researching indigenous artistic practices included Yve Chavez, Eva Mayhabal Davis, Kendra Greendeer, Frances Holmes, Madison Treece, and Stephanie Sparling Williams. Participants in Aram Han Sifuentes’ workshops have created over 2500 banners that she routinely lends to protesters marching to protect Native American ancestral lands.

Of special interest was a panel entitled “Artworks of the Future/Artworks for Jellyfish,” during which artists Ted Hiebert and Ryuta Nakijima, artist/ornithologist Silas Fischer, and art historian Amanda Boetzkes discussed bird wellbeing, songbird “consent,” planetary flesh-relations, co-embodiment, the loss of the other vs. extinction, and artworks created by cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopuses, and squids), whose “adaptive coloration” capacities enable them to blend in with computer-generated images of artworks. Another artist who mixes science and art is Xiaojing Yan, who uses a diverse range of natural materials, including pine needles, freshwater pearls, lingzhi mushrooms, and cicada exoskeletons. To create her living sculptures, she puts wood chips and lingzhi spore mixtures into a mold and then removes the mold so the mushrooms can continue growing in a greenhouse.

One of the sessions whose artworks especially addressed climate change was “During the “From Wheatfields to Ecosophy: A Consideration of Women Artists in the History of Climate Change” session, which Cynthia Veloric who invited me to be the discussant organized. Diane Burko surveyed her paintings that characterize climate change’s effects over a century. Christina Catanese introduced “The Tempestry Project” for which dozens of knitters registered daily temperature fluctuations in colored yarn, while Bonnie Peterson presented her elaborate embroideries that depict environmental data. Jenny Kendler discussed Birds Watching (2018-2019), which captures the eyes of 100 U.S. climate-threatened species, while Daniela Naomi Molnar shared her watercolor paintings that map climate change reshaping our planet.      

The panel “Aviva Rahmani: From Ecofeminism to Climate Justice” highlighted Rahmani’s oeuvre beginning with her carrying/caring for an object for a week as an undergraduate up through The Blued Tree Symphony (2015-present). MOCA Los Angeles curator Rebecca Skafsgaard Lowery highlighted her early performances, such as The Pocket Book Piece (1969), during which participants described their association to purse items; Smelling (1972), for which blindfolded Cal Arts students sniffed one another to try to identify each other by scent, and the collaborative activist performance Ablutions (1972), which took place in Laddie John Dill’s studio. For this feminist artwork, Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Sandy Orgel, and Rahmani choreographed performers seated in metal bathtubs, filled with eggs, animal blood, and clay; while the audience heard various speakers personal accounts of rape. Curator Monika Fabijanska remarked that Rahmani was among the first to connect the rape/assault of women to routine violations/abuses of nature. Chava Maeve Krivchenia discussed the results of Rahmani’s having painted boulders alongside a public causeway blue to draw attention to the stagnant water below. Despite having been officially invited by a curator to create this public artwork, an islander subpoenaed her to wash off the paint. With help from the local Garden Club, her “wash-in” became a “teach-in” for passersby. Thanks to her actions, the causeway was opened enough to allow for tidal flushing, thus restoring 27 acres of coastal wetlands. Finally, copyright lawyer Gale Elston explained the significance of Rahmani’s exploration of the limits of VARA, the law protecting artists against artwork damage/removal. To protect forests from fossil fuel development, she painted blue sine waves on trees and copyrighted hundreds of “tree-notes” in an aerial score in the paths of natural gas pipelines as art.

The rare speaker focused on surface water, Omar Olivares Sandoval’s “Critical Geologies: Contemporary Geoaesthetic Research of Mexico City Lakes” addressed the idealization of Mexico City as a lake. TFAP Ecofeminisms 4, one of several affiliated panels, featured a “Waterways” session, during which Gina McDaniel Tarver discussed Alicia Barney Caldas’ installation Río Cauca (1981-1982), which featured 3 transparent tanks of river water embedded with 15 test tube samples. During the “Art and Ecology in the Middle East and West Asia” panel, Nat Muller discussed Jumana Manna’s Wild Relatives (2018). This “sci-fi” documentary captures the efforts of farmers inhabiting Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley to replicate Aleppo’s seed bank, which had closed in 2012 as a result of the Syrian Civil War, with heirloom seeds acquired from Svalbard’s Global Seed Vault.

No discussion of climate justice would be complete without remarking on ways to overhaul the capitalocene, which many consider the underlying source of all our ecological ills. Keynote speaker Salah Hassan spoke persuasively of the need for art history to reposition the global south to the center to shift the very paradigms that sustain inequalities stemming from capitalism’s history of racism and slavery. Acting as the discussant for “Art and Ecology in the Middle East and West Asia,” T. J. Demos noted the transition from “petro-affectivity,” such that petrodollars that once greased the Iranian art world, affording artists distinct advantages; now exhibit “necro-affectivity.” For Demos, Muller’s paper muses on “interrogations of precarity and terminal endings visited upon refugee seeds as much as refugee people as investigated in Manna’s slow cinema of slow violence with its somber meditations on the sepulchral afterlife of a culture’s biogenetic heritage as it sits in the seed vault that is itself threatened by the catastrophic climate breakdown and melting permafrost resulting from that earlier fossil capital modernity.” 

Note: ecoartspace members noted in bold

The ecoartspace May 2021 e-Newsletter is HERE

(Apis/Homo)

Connection/Collaboration 1:
An Interview about interspecies experiences with Dana Michele Hemes
by Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein 

Dana Michele Hemes collaborates with humans, insects, microbiomes and bees (to name just a few) in her interspecies experiences. Converging the artistic with the scientific, her work is all about accentuating already existing (but often unnoticeable) interactions in the world around us. Often her work involves highly perceptive technologies that create incredible interactions and sensory spaces. Dana speaks about the importance of connectedness with the environment and between people, her collaborative mindset (with all sizes and beings) and the limits of perception in this interview.  

It's so great to speak with you, Dana! Let’s jump right in. Your work often involves interactive sculptures to encourage interspecies communication. Where did your inspiration for this work come from?

I’m interested in the entanglements or connections in the world around us, so I set up scenarios to explore this connectedness. One way I do this is by creating interactive spaces where humans and nonhumans can share a sensory experience. I’m curious as to what we can learn by being present and aware of our shared, intersecting existences… For me, exploring these interspecies relationships is a way to better understand my place in the world.

I think a lot about the limits of our perception of our environments.

(Homo/Homo 2 Phase 2)

That’s beautiful! You seem to highlight these small, often unseen interactions. How do you decide what to magnify?

When designing interactive spaces, I try to organize them in ways where both species (human and nonhuman) can affect and be affected. In doing so, I think a lot about the limits of our perception of our environments. I start by researching the nonhuman species to learn about how they sense the world; and oftentimes, I build the workaround senses that we share. For example, Ariadna/Homo 1 (which is about corolla spiders) and Pogonomyrmex/Homo 8 (harvester ants) are installations that explore methods of hearing. Humans, corolla spiders, and harvester ants detect and respond to sound in their environments.

Sometimes the sensory stimuli are imperceptible to humans-- like sounds that are too small or high-pitched for our ears, or light beyond the visible spectrum. In these cases, I use tools to amplify or adapt the stimuli so we are better able to perceive and engage with one another. I also find magnification and shifting scales useful when working with small or microscopic creatures, as a way to bring the human and nonhuman together.

Exploring these interspecies relationships is a way to better understand my own place in the world.

(Ariadna/Homo 1)

By magnifying aspects of foraging behavior or listening strategies, you seem to be helping insects, microbiomes, spiders etc., express their voices. What are the results of these conversations?

That’s a great question-- and one of the drivers behind the work itself. I’m particularly interested in what emerges as these interspecies conversations take place… and it varies. I don’t have a specific message that I want people to take away from the work; instead, I’m aiming to invite people to try a new or different way of seeing or listening or feeling or being.

I don’t have a specific message that I want people to take away from the work; instead, I’m aiming to invite people to try a new or different way of seeing or listening or feeling or being.

(Apis/Homo 1)

For example, Apis/Homo 1 is a simple, wearable device that creates an opportunity for humans and bees to share an intimate space. Bees can enter and exit the headpiece freely, but the partially closed helmet contains and concentrates the buzzing sounds and flower smells, etc. Here I’m not aiming to make a statement about bees; instead, I’m building a scenario that encourages bee/human conversation and focused observation. The result or takeaway of that shared experience is left for the bees and humans to explore if they want.

I hope that people take away a greater sense of connectedness to the world, and/or a willingness or interest in trying to think beyond themselves or the human. Perhaps it’s a new lens to have in your back pocket that invites a broadened perspective, empathy, or flexibility of the self.

It seems like your work process is also part of the exploration. Do you consider your subjects interspecies collaborators or actors in your vision?

I think it’s important to note that the subject of the work is the whole experience-- the interaction that takes place between humans, nonhumans, and the constructed space. The ants, bacteria, humans, tech, corn, birds, sunlight, air, etc. are all components that shape the interaction. For example, Homo[+]/Homo 2, Phase 2 is a work that connects humans to their bacterial microbiomes through vegetable fiber candies.  It was first shown at a one-night event in an indoor gallery at Pioneer Works. I used the feedback on candy flavors to tweak recipes and addressed questions by reorganizing the components of the work. Homo[+]/Homo 2, Phase 3 is the updated version, which was then activated at an outdoor festival at the Wassaic Project. 

With this in mind, I consider all of the active participant's collaborators-- living and nonliving. But this collaborative connectedness doesn’t only occur in my built environments; it happens all the time. I’m using art as a method to illuminate these connections and to facilitate broader perspectives beyond the human.

I consider all of the active participant's collaborators… this collaborative connectedness doesn’t only occur in my built environments; it happens all the time.

(Homo/Homo 2 Phase 2)

It all seems very scientific and you name your works in the Latin or in traditional scientific classifications. What role do the traditions of science play in your work?

My work is interdisciplinary-- integrating science, philosophy, and art into the making and thinking. So science is an essential part of my practice. I love that curiosity is baked into its core, and that scientists ask big questions and have specific methods and tools for searching for answers. I’m also fascinated by taxonomy or the systems we use to order and categorize information-- particularly the limitations of these systems, like when we discover something that doesn’t quite fit into any of our categories. Scientific classification changes, which highlights the fluid nature of our knowledge about the world. Originally, Linnaeus’ taxonomy only had 2 kingdoms-- plants and animals. For a while, there were 8 kingdoms, which were later reduced to 6, and as of 2015 there are 7… and there is still plenty of room for debate around outliers-- like viruses.

For something that seems so neat and orderly, it’s actually a messy, malleable, slippery and sometimes contentious process. I think that’s why I’m drawn to using them in my titles… Plus, naming things feels like a very human thing to do.

Collaboration is an important part of my process-- whether it’s working with scientists, programmers, the public, or other species-- it helps the work grow into something bigger and more interesting.

(Homo/Homo 3 Phase 2)

And you often include human technologies to create your works including specialized engineering and sensorial technology. How do you approach scientific and engineering problems as an artist?

I’d say that I approach engineering problems with naive enthusiasm. There is so much I don’t know about computer science and electrical engineering; so, I blindly assume that if I have a specific question or tech need, there must be an answer in a forum in some corner of the internet.

Also, I ask for help from people who know more than me. Collaboration is an important part of my process-- whether it’s working with scientists, programmers, the public, or other species-- it helps the work grow into something bigger and more interesting.

My work is about shifting perspectives and revealing a thing that’s already there…

(Pogo/Homo)

There was this lovely description in your artist statement, where you write “Each moment is an event: an active, participatory state where all parts of a system affect and are affected”, how can art accentuate or add to this participation? Do you consider your work a form of performance art?

Art is a medium that can set a framework that intentionally requests an open mind. It’s stuff that’s about other stuff. It sets people up for looking deeply and feeling their way through an unknown. My work is about shifting perspectives and revealing a thing that’s already there-- so while people are always active participants in the world, I think it might be easier to engage meaningfully when the environment requests and directs focus.

I consider my work interactive rather than performance, only because I don’t want to risk implying that there’s a distinction between the actor(s) and the audience. I think that the term “interactive” helps to frame the experience as one where you cause change and can be changed... all parts affect and are affected.

And lastly, how have your projects adapted to Covid-19 times given that there is now less possibility for live experiences?

The lack of physical interactions with people has definitely been a challenge. That said, I’ve been able to continue collaborating with artists and scientists through virtual means. I’m currently working on a project that is exploring our connection to the octopus, which is supported by the Ocean Memory Project. The Ocean Memory community is a cross-disciplinary, far-reaching network of people who come from different backgrounds and areas of expertise (and geographic locations). With video-based virtual meeting technologies becoming so commonplace, it has made these long-distance conversations easier. One thing that this pandemic has illustrated is the connectedness of the world; and how these connections shape our lives and behaviors in real and sometimes painful ways.

But things are starting to reopen; and I’m excited to be starting a studio residency at Cornerstone STUDIOS. I optimistically look forward to future gatherings... humans, nonhumans, and all.

danamichelehemes.com

The ecoartspace April 2021 e-Newsletter is HERE

ecoartspace is pleased to host the Scientist Artist Net Zero (SANZ) policy initiative on our website for ecoartists to participate as full partners in policy decisions regarding the climate crisis. ecoartspace shares the Biden administration’s vision for an existential and pragmatic race to net-zero. We invite you to join us in the effort to amplify outreach and effect systemic changes towards that goal.

Please access further information about the SANZ initiative here and add your signature HERE.

ScienceARtNetZero.pdf

CALL FOR ARTISTS

I AM WATER

DEADLINE May 10, 2021

I AM WATER is a public art exhibition organized by Our Humanity Matters and ecoartspace in collaboration with SaveArtSpace. The exhibition will consist of a series of billboards sited in New York City that will address our relationship to water and our human understanding that we are water.

Water is the origin of life with the innate purpose to continue creation. In water, we see that everything is connected and interrelated. Everything is liquid before it becomes solid. Humans, who are mostly water, depend on it to protect our DNA and for our basic survival. Water is not a resource but an essential connection to life. The one-sidedness of modern consciousness and our disconnect from nature increasingly subjects water to pollution. If we do not change our behavior, we will run out of water.

We humans cannot be healthy if our waters are not healthy. This exhibition is an opportunity to show water’s mystery and importance and to help reestablish, on a deep cellular level, the intimate relationship with water that we have lost in modern life. 

Exhibition Curator: Patricia Watts, founder of ecoartspace

Production Curator: Tanja Andrejasic Wechsler, founder of Our Humanity Matters

We invite artists over the age of 18 years to submit their artwork between March 15 and May 10, 2021. This is an opportunity to have your work placed on ad space in New York City.

There is a $10 donation per image submission to participate, each donation is tax-deductible and goes to producing the public art. Each artist is encouraged to submit up to 10 images including video stills (digital billboards not guaranteed). The selected artists will be announced after May 24 and will be exhibited on ad spaces in New York City, launching in June for at least one month.

CALL FOR ARTISTS

Embodied Forest

DEADLINE May 15, 2021

Embodied Forest is the title of the fall ecoartspace online exhibition + book that will launch September 1, 2021. Applicants whose work addresses our human relationship with trees and forests are encouraged to apply.

In the context of this exhibition, the term embodied can be understood as the act of giving a body to something intangible; to incarnate; to stand in the same place of; to become part of a collective body; to personify; or to empathize. The subject matter of your work for Embodied Forest will address the worlds of trees and forests including though not limited to companion species, microbes, root systems, mushrooms, birds, fungus, moss, lichen, mist/fog/water, insects, spiders, parasites, bacteria, etc.

The entanglements of a forest are unlimited and we are seeking to represent an in-depth examination of the interconnectedness of trees with all living things including humans. All mediums are accepted and will include performance, sound and video. Abstraction is also encouraged.

Since June 2020 ecoartspace has held a monthly Zoom dialogue with member artists presenting their work about trees. Sant Khalsa, curator of Tree Talk and founder of the Joshua Tree Center For Photographic Arts will be co-hosting this monthly dialogue through the end of 2021. A select group of artists from Embodied Forest will be featured in upcoming events.

You must be an ecoartspace member to apply

(please email info@ecoartspace.org if you're financially impacted and would like to apply)

JUROR

Lilian Fraiji is a curator and producer based in the Amazon, Brazil and is the co-founder of LABVERDE program, a project dedicated to developing multidisciplinary content involving art, science and nature. As an independent researcher Fraiji is interested in how culture is related to nature and how the landscape is shaped in the Anthropocene. She has curated several art exhibitions involving the subject of Nature including in 2019, How to Talk with Trees and Irreversível, and in 2018, Invisible Landscape. Currently, Fraiji is the curator of the online Festival called Tomorrow is Now and is collaborating with Sonic Matter: The Witness (Festival in Swiss) and the SIM São Paulo. She is a specialist in Cultural Management from Barcelona University and has a Master’s degree in Curating Arts from the University of Ramon Llull, Barcelona. In 2020 Fraiji was awarded the Serrapilheira prize for contributing to democratizing science.

Diane Burko talks about flying with James Turrell, becoming a climate activist, and current work

By Susan IsaacsMarch 12, 2021 on Artblog

Artblog contributor Susan Isaacs connects with climate art activist Diane Burko over their shared admiration for artists like Augustus Vincent Tack, their interest in climate-focused art, and Diane's upcoming lecture at Towson University (where Susan is a professor and curator).

Diane Burko, known for her activist paintings and programs dealing with environmental issues, spoke with Susan Isaacs recently via Zoom. Burko has an upcoming live Zoom lecture at Towson University that is free and open to the public on March 25, 2021 at 6:30 p.m. and an upcoming exhibition: Seeing Climate Change: Diane Burko, 2002-2021 at the American University Museum at the Katzen Center, Washington D.C. August 28—December 12, 2021. Register for the Towson lecture.

Susan Isaacs: Hi Diane. So, we found we have a common interest. You discovered the work of Augustus Vincent Tack when you were in graduate school at Penn and were inspired by Tack’s abstraction of the landscape, responding to his lozenge-like shapes in your blue and white paintings. I wrote my dissertation on Tack.

Diane Burko: What an amazing coincidence. I loved visiting all his work at the Phillips.

SI: Let’s discuss your background. You began as a painter?

DB: Yes, I was a painter though I always used the camera, initially to document my work and to record what I was seeing and, for me, seeing was all about the landscape.

It was all about going out and being swept away by these big empty open spaces, probably because I was from the city (originally Brooklyn) and I never saw open spaces. I lived in an apartment building, and I was just captivated right from the start with these large vistas, these dramatic panoramas, and of course I had seen them in Hudson River School paintings in my art history books and classes, and also French painters who I knew quite a bit about so that’s where I began.

SI: So, from the beginning as a professional artist, you felt, you were a landscape painter.

DB: Yes, you know I painted the figure and the still life and all that stuff that you do in school, but I think the reason I latched on to the landscape is because it allowed me to be the most abstract.

It gave me the most control of what I wanted to do. Although I actually started graduate school as an abstract artist. I entered not with the realistic paintings that I left with, but with these very large pastel oil stick abstract images that were reminiscent of a combination of maybe de Kooning and Matta. You know, it was that era. Remember, I was doing work in the late 60s, so a lot of my teachers were second, third generation abstract expressionists, so I was very much of that school when I entered graduate school.

SI: And when you were doing that, did you think about content at all?

DB: All of the terminology and the theory that we now have in post modernism—all of that was totally absent in my education; it was all about the canvas, making the work, being involved in the work, I had no real awareness of where I was in the world, quite frankly. And I loved just making stuff. I fell in love with painting; it became a habit. The content at that point was the landscape.

The tenor of Penn at the time was to paint what you were seeing. I realized that after I got there. Landscape painting was a whole new world. Going to the Grand Canyon was amazing, and I think at the beginning, I was just responding to what I was looking at.

I always made photographs of the landscapes that I would visit, especially since seeing the Grand Canyon, flying with Jim Turrell. Jim and I met socially in the 70s, when we’re both very young and I told him I was going to the Grand Canyon. He said, “You don’t want to drive, you want to fly into the Grand Canyon.” He claimed he could fly so I wrote to him, we connected, and Arizona State University drove me up to meet him in Mesa, which is where he had his plane and it changed my life. It is more abstract to look at these patterns that appear when you look down on the landscape. Yvonne Jaquette was doing the same sort of thing—we had similar paintings at that point in time; I would take these photographs, bring them back to the studio, and paint from the photographs.

SI: So that flight was very important in terms of shifting your viewpoint.

Continue reading HERE