MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

July 24, 2023

This week we recognize  Hollis Hammonds Hollis Hammonds,     and her multimedia body of work that reminisces on past experiences and explores disaster, both environmental and man-made.

"My House: The Storm," 2014 (above) was a wall installation of assembled drawings included in the exhibition titled “Drawn In / Drawn Out,” at the Grace Museum in Abilene, Texas. The exhibition was made up of works by contemporary artists who challenge traditional concepts of drawing. Over the last decade drawing has become recognized as a stand-alone medium and like other art media, in this age of cultural and technological flux and innovation, the definition of drawing has expanded to include 3-D and conceptual forms. The works explored new drawing strategies that include site-specific installations, wall drawings, multilayered compositions and atypical approaches to the art of drawing."

 click images for more info

“Wasteland/Wonderland,” 2016 (above) was a solo exhibition at the Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, Texas, made up of installation and video projection. In this exhibit, Hammonds asked spectators to reconsider the objects we amass after they are transformed by disaster. Something she was forced to consider after her childhood home burned down, she addresses this disaster in a number of her works. With a strong interest in narrative and storytelling, the video projection in this exhibition was meant to engage the viewer to feel the turmoil and drama of the burning house. While the sculptural piece was meant to engage the view through tactile interaction.”

“Homecoming,” 2019 (above) is a collection of objects that directly reflect Hammonds childhood, including the forest behind her home filled with detritus and junk. Her Depression era parents’ had a tendency to collect trinkets (ceramic poodles, dolls, figurines, etc.) and save anything of value (including plastic bottles, rusty nails, old cars, wood, metal, and so on). In this work, Hammonds again addresses the emotion surrounding a fire that burned her family home to the ground when she was just 15 years old.“

Awake in the Dark, 2021 (above) is a multimedia exhibition resulting from a collaboration between visual artist Hollis Hammonds and poet Sasha West, aka Hammonds + West. The pieces begin what Timothy Morton calls “grief work,” articulating the experience of living in the midst of a fragile, changing ecosystem. Through self-interrogations, the artists question both individual and societal contributions to the environmental crisis. Viewers dwell in wreckage, suspended between flood and fire, stasis and loss. Objects lose their meaning as markers for a normal existence. In these works, the distinction between natural and human-made disasters starts to collapse. Hammonds and West invited viewers to see their own part in making the physical world and, thus, the future.

“The River Entered my Home,” 2022 (below) was a collaborative exhibit shown at CCAD (Columbus College of Art and Design), Columbus, Ohio. Created by Hammonds + West, a team made up of artist Hollis Hammonds and poet Sasha West. This exhibit featured video, light, found objects, and sound. The sound component includes the voice of Sasha West reading her poems "Ode to Fossil Fuel" and "My House Was Beside the River." In their collaborative work Hammonds + West combine sound with sculptural installation, video with drawings, and words with images, both artists offer their personal vantage points on the precipice of a forbidding future. Their work opens liminal spaces where hard boundaries dissolve: past disasters forecast future ones, the crackle of fire becomes the cracking of wreckage in water, what is civilization becomes wilderness.“

Hollis Hammonds          is a multimedia artist whose work, built on memory and utilizing evidence from the public collective consciousness, investigates social issues ranging from economic disparity and state violence to environmental degradation and human-made disasters. Her dystopian drawings and found-object installations have been widely exhibited throughout the US, including solo exhibitions at venues such as Women & Their Work in Austin, Texas, Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC, Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, Texas, and the Reed Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. She has been an artist in residence at McColl Center for Art + Innovation, University of Wisconsin-Marathon, Indie Grits Film Festival, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Hammonds is the author of Drawing Structure: Conceptual and Observational Techniques and has had her creative work featured in New American Paintings, Manifest’s International Drawing Annual, FOA, Uppercase, and Art on Paper. She is a Professor of Art and Chair of the Department of Visual Studies at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. www.hollishammonds.com

Featured images (top to bottom): ©Hollis Hammonds, Drawn In / Drawn Out, 2014, drawing, charcoal, Mylar, rubble, vinyl, furniture; Wasteland / Wonderland, 2016, solo exhibition at the Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, Texas, drawing, found objects, projections; Homecoming, 2019, found objects, drawing, at the Fine Arts Galleries, School of the Arts at Northern Kentucky University, as part of the 2019 National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) conference; Awake in the Dark, 2021, exhibited at Austin Public Library Gallery; The River Entered My Home, 2022, ink on Yupo paper, exhibited at CCAD (Columbus College of Art and Design), Ohio; Portrait of artist by Roberta Cornew.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles on
(Re)Imagining Freshkills Park

See how New York’s largest landfill is
being transformed into an urban oasis.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, Evangelos Kotsioris

Jul 14, 2023, MoMA magazine online

In 2001, the design office of James Corner Field Operations won the competition to transform Fresh Kills, New York’s largest landfill, into a park. The project’s first completed segment, which will allow the public access to this vast site, is scheduled to open later this year. Freshkills Park is one of 12 projects featured in the exhibition Architecture Now: New York, New Publics, on view at MoMA through July 29, 2023.

Among the materials included in the Freshkills Park display is a photograph of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s landmark Social Mirror, an artwork comprising a sanitation truck covered in mirrored panels. Having worked as the artist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation in New York since 1977, a role she initiated, Ukeles is closely linked to the creation of Freshkills Park. We recently spoke to the artist about her long-standing relationship with this contested site and two of the numerous art projects she has proposed for it since 1989.

—Evangelos Kotsioris and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: I discovered Fresh Kills in the late 1970s, while working on an art project titled Touch Sanitation, which involved visiting every single sanitation district in New York, shaking hands with each of the 8,500 workers, and saying to each, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” Between 1979 and ’80, I was going to Staten Island often. I had been to all of the other landfills in the city. But when I went to Fresh Kills for the first time, I was stunned. The all-night unloading operation was remarkable: a continuous flow of garbage.

There were seven operating landfills at the time, and by 1985, the State Department of Environmental Conservation shut all of them down except for one in Queens, which was temporarily left open. After that was closed too, the only landfill that would receive waste—a big decision made by the city, because of its size—was Fresh Kills in Staten Island. Fresh Kills continued to operate until its closure in 2001. Following that, an exception had to be made for it to receive the debris of the World Trade Center. There were 300 people working 24 hours a day at Fresh Kills at that time. It was a very busy workplace with a constant stream of barges unloading waste 24/7, except for Christmas Day—only one day off a year, that’s it!

Continue reading at MOMA magazine here

Above: Birds Watching III, 2023 a new commission by Jenny Kendler as part of Dear Earth: Art & Hope in a Time of Crisis for the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre in London — Jul 21–Sept 3, 2023

Eco Exhibitions Won't Save Us

Marv Recinto Opinion

18 July 2023 artreview.com

Artists and institutions seem content to merely ‘address’, ‘engage with’ or ‘respond to’ the climate crisis. It’s time for a concerted shift towards action

Exhibitions of art about ecology have been sprouting up everywhere, usually operating under some premise of ‘raising awareness’ for the climate crisis. The Hayward Gallery – with their ongoing exhibition, Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis – is just one recent example of many institutions, in London alone, that have rushed to stage ecocritical shows over the last few years: the Serpentine has an ongoing programme called General Ecology via which they stage related exhibitions like Back to Earth (2022); the Barbican Art Gallery’s Our Time on Earth (2022); various exhibitions at Tate, among them A Clearing in the Forest (2022); The Photographers’ Gallery’s When I image the earth, I imagine another (2021); Somerset House’s We Are History (2021); or the Royal Academy’s Eco-Visionaries (2019). Countless others have been staged around the world: a random sampling might include Simbiología: Prácticas Artísticas en un Planeta en Emergencia (Centro Cultural Kirchner, Buenos Aires, 2021); Adaptation: A Reconnected Earth (MCAD Manila, 2023); and Our Ecology (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, autumn 2023). And that really is to name just a few. While these exhibitions do doubtlessly have the potential to inform ideological narratives surrounding the ecological crisis, they can so often feel futile in the face of real environmental devastation.

Art wields immense possibilities in its potential to visualise ideas, but its role throughout history and in various cultures has continuously changed: it can function for its own sake, envision radical possibilities and, in more recent years, it has acted as a research medium; through all of this, it has generally continued to act as an art object that invites speculation. Art institutions have also treated art as such, taking their cues from the art and artists they exhibit. What feels different, however, about ecocritical art is that the very topic it engages with proposes widespread ruin and demands that action be immediately taken to counteract such an apocalypse. 

Read full ecocritical review here

Dear Earth includes outdoor installation (above) by member Jenny Kendler.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

July 17, 2023

This week we recognize  Colin LyonsColin Lyons, and his fifteen year practice focused on geoengineering, extraction, alchemy, historical preservation and brownfield rehabilitation.

"Boom Town," 2007-2009 (above) is modeled after former industrial buildings along Montreal’s Lachine Canal, and is an installation of print-based sculptures that considers the possibilities after industrial obsolescence. Meticulously rendered from source photographs, these etching plates are first printed as blueprints, and later cut and folded to make small-scale paper architectures. Finally, the end of the edition is marked by soldering the plates together, thwarting the process of mass production, while giving the plates a new purpose. Piled on top of one another, these sculptures can be read as a mass burial site, monument, or heap of scrap metal. The incongruity of these industrial structures built delicately out of paper reminds us of the one-time assumption of invincibility within these industries."

 click images for more info

"The Conservator, 2013 (above) is a site-specific sculpture designed for The Soap Factory. This restoration machine was powered by a sprawling battery, where hundreds of cells were created from discarded zinc and copper etching plates, and fueled by a ferric chloride etching solution. Designed to polish a rusted I-beam within the gallery space, this process revealed a small space of gentrification within this post-industrial ruin. Through the process, the battery simultaneously erodes the plates, allowing it to hold a charge for just a few minutes. In the reclaiming of industrial complexes, the impulse to polish the architecture has become almost habitual, cleansing the space of its industrial heritage, and marking its new existence. This installation reverses that practice, where the act of polishing brings a sharpened awareness of the labour that was once performed within the space."

"During Lyons first visit to Dawson City, in January 2010, he was brought to look out at the vast intestinal tailing piles left by decades of dredging in the area. This vista became the lasting image of his trip to the Yukon. In revisiting Dawson, Lyon began with a quintessentially Klondike activity – a kind of treasure hunting. Over the course of several weeks, he walked along the dredge tailings near Bonanza Creek, using a metal detector to excavate industrial cast-offs. With this collection in tow, he brought it to the Midnight Dome, where he installed my "Time Machine for abandoned futures" 2015 (above); a strange off-the-grid laboratory which became my home for over a week. This shelter adopts design strategies common in earthship architecture (rain-water collection, south facing greenhouse windows, rammed earth, etc.), but rather than environmental sustainability as its guiding principle, this bubbling chemical structure comes closer to the absurd inefficiency of many of our modern industrial pursuits. Powering this machine is a massive, roof-top battery, in which etching plates and etching acid power an electrolytic cleaning process to remove the rust from my scavenged artifacts. Once cleaned, Lyon meticulously etches the markings left by decades of rust and erosion, forming a kind of topographical map. The result is a glistening surface that memorializes the artifact’s entire lifespan. Overlooking the dredge tailings, this machine presents a kind of prototype for the preservation of degradation."

"We will find salvation in strategic chemical spills," 2022 (above) considers recent climate-engineering proposals through the lens of alchemy. The prints borrow cloudscapes from 16th Century engraver/alchemist Hendrick Goltzius’ Metamorphoses, which depict atmosphere as solid and material, rather than a non-space; a vital concept in an age of rapidly rising atmospheric carbon levels. But here, the gods are replaced by geoengineering schemes - proposals to wash away the sins of the Anthropocene. Silkscreened over these etchings are materials such as crude oil, sulfuric acid, iron sulfate, olivine, sea salt, silica, and pyrite, which might play a role in future geoengineering technologies. Over the coming years, these images depicting congressional documents and volcanic eruptions will become increasingly visible, as the urgency to deploy these radical climate “solutions” intensifies. Etched into their plexiglass frames, and casting shadows onto the wall are descriptive technical texts written in Esperanto, pointing to the need for a new global governance structure for the coming era of global climate modification, when the key question might center on who has the right to experiment with the environment, when the burden of responsibility and the burden of impact are asymmetrical."

In 1942, British inventor Geoffrey Pyke proposed an ambitious plan to develop a massive, ice-based aircraft carrier code-named Operation Habbakuk (aka ‘Bergship’). Soon after, a team of Canadian conscientious objectors were sent to Jasper National Park to develop a 1000-ton prototype that would utilize a new material called Pykrete - a mixture of wood pulp and ice, which was believed to be easily repairable and nearly unsinkable. However, the project was eventually abandoned, and its remains now rest at the bottom of Patricia Lake. "At its core "Operation Habbakuk," 2022 (below) explores the science of geo-engineering attempts to mimic, accelerate, or amplify natural processes of carbon reduction using highly invasive means. These strategies form a dystopian contingency plan which, employed alongside mitigation efforts, strive to preserve a close approximation of our present ecosystem. Geo-engineering stands as a kind of messianic figure for the planet, proposing to wash away the sins of the Anthropocene. However, instead of practical geoengineering prototypes, Lyons techno-solutions offer little more than time capsules, laying bare the folly of our desire to find salvation in the fine balance of strategic chemical spills, and proposing rituals which blend the sacred and scientific to question what kind of nature we hope to approximate within a techno-solutionist future."

Colin Lyons                           grew up in the birthplace of the North American oil industry, Petrolia, Ontario in Canada, an experience that has fueled his interests in industrial ruins and sacrificial landscapes. His most recent site-based installations have been located in mine tailing piles, decommissioned landfills, historic flood infrastructure, urban brownfields, and remote islands. In recent years, Lyons has participated in fellowships and residencies including    MacDowell in New Hampshire, The Arctic Circle Residency in Svalbard, and ÖRES on the island in Finland. His work has been shown widely in recent solo and group exhibitions internationally, and his projects have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, The Santo Foundation, The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and The National Trust for Historic Preservation.    He received his BFA from Mount Allison University (2007) and MFA in printmaking from University of Alberta (2012).  Lyons currently lives in Binghamton, New York, where he is an assistant professor at Binghamton University (SUNY).  www.colinlyons.ca

Featured images (top to bottom): ©Colin Lyons, Boom Town 2007-2009, etching on paper, wood, zinc etching plates; The Conservator, 2022, (battery: zinc plates, copper plates, glass, wire, ferric chloride), photo by Sarah Nienaber; Time Machine for Abandoned Futures, 2015, Plexiglas, aluminum, copper sulfate, soda ash, copper plates, zinc plates, wires, artifacts; We will find salvation in strategic chemical spills, 2022, iron Fertilization, etching, silkscreen (printed with iron sulfate, ferric chloride, olivine and rust from gold-rush artifacts), laser engraving, 22 x 15 inches; Operation Habbakuk, 2022, video still from Operation Habbakuk (2:45), produced at MacDowell and ÖRES through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts; Portrait of artist by Evan Rensch.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT July 10, 2023 This week we recognize WhiteFeather Hunter, and her transdisciplinary body of work focused on bioart. “Alma,” 2009 - ongoing (above) became an internet sensation in 2012, going viral with over 5 million hits in three days, via reddit front page. She went viral again in 2015, also via reddit front page. "Hoof Hand" is Alma's internet pseudonym/avatar, appointed organically, and spontaneously performed by the reddit community. Rogue taxidermy sculpture of human hair, found wig, recycled Persian lamb coat, beaver fur, rabbit fur, mink fur, raffia, goat skin, acrylic paint, gold leaf, beeswax, deer hoof, moose teeth, taxidermy epoxy putty, found vintage mannequin. Alma explores the simultaneous worship, demonizing and mythologizing of female autonomy, hybridity and sexuality.”  click images for more info

“Alchematrix” 2013 (above) a self-portrait performance with gold leaf on skin, rendered as .gif animations. This performance was originally done as embodied research into the Russian folkloric witch character, Baba Yaga. Closely related to the ancient Scythian sun goddess, Tibiti, Baba Yaga sometimes has a gold leg. Here the artist's entire body is covered in gold leaf and gestures are enacted that reference both madness and seduction, qualities every witch is understood to possess. The .gif format was used for its endless repetitive nature, referencing obsessive acts and the inability to ever complete them. Alchematrix was displayed in miniature on an iPhone 4 within the upper floor of the separate work. One of the Alchematrix series was also published as a photo in Perle magazine as part of the Montreal Erotic Art exhibition (2013).”

Whitefeather, as a collaborator, co-designed and developed a key part of the project “Wastelands,” 2018 (above) with Tagny Duff. Her co-invention of a new bioplastic, with art conservator Courtney Books, provided the basis for the biomaterial development used to construct the carrier bags for the project. WhiteFeather solely produced the new biomaterial, and adapted design sketches provided by Tagny Duff, to create carrier bags used to house biogas generators conceived by Duff for the project. The work was first shown at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in 2018. Wastelands received an honorable mention at Ars Electronica 2019, and was nominated for the STARTS Prize. WhiteFeather's work on the project contributed significantly to its overall aesthetic, functionality and conceptual framework.

“The Witch in the Lab Coat,” 2019-present (above) is a PhD research-creation and scientific research project (in progress) that explores the intersection of feminist witchcraft and tissue engineering through the development of a body-and-performance-based laboratory practice. This is a work in progress conducted at SymbioticA International Centre of Excellence in Biological Art in the School of Human Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Additional laboratory facilities have included at the University of Montreal, University of Ottawa and the DZNE (German Center for Neurodegenerative Disease) at Charité Berlin. The Witch in the Lab Coat includes the sub-project, Mooncalf, an original research by WhiteFeather, which is a scientific and cultural exploration of the development of menstrual serum for use in tissue culture, as well as endometrial mesenchymal stem cell (eMSC) isolation from menstrual blood. 3D Bioprinting is a project that is currently in progress 2022-2023, (below) and is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec. The intention with this project is to look at advanced manufacturing methods for constructing tissue forms from WhiteFeather's own taboo body materials. She has written about and presented numerous times over the past years about the composition of menstrual fluid and how it is a non-invasive source of stem cell acquisition. This has been her first opportunity to experiment with bioprinting and to use her stem cells in bio-inks that she was both developing and purchasing.

WhiteFeather Hunter specializes in biomaterials research, used predominantly to develop new critical discourse. She has been professionally engaged in a craft-based (bio)art practice for over 18 years, via an ongoing material investigation of the functional, aesthetic and technological potential of bodily materials. Her works coalesce various media approaches, such as textile methods, biology, storytelling (video, audio and text), performance, public intervention, digital + web-based installations and DIY electronics. WhiteFeather holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fibres and Material Practices from Concordia University. She is currently a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow, Australian Government International RTP Scholar and UWA Postgraduate Scholar, situated between the School of Human Sciences and School of Design at The University of Western Australia. She has collaborated and worked in numerous international laboratory-based artist research residencies. She has lectured, shown and performed work internationally and has been featured in multiple international magazines, journals, art books, blogs, video and television spotlights. Featured images (top to bottom):©WhiteFeather Hunter, Alma 2009, human hair, Persian lamb, beaver fur, rabbit fur, mink, raffia, goat skin, acrylic paint, gold leaf, beeswax, deer hoof, moose teeth, taxidermy epoxy, found vintage mannequin, 69” x 33” x 24”; Alchematrix, 2013, shown in gif format; Wastelands, 2018, shown at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University; The Witch in the Lab Coat, 2019, conducted at SymbioticA International Centre of Excellence in Biological Art in the School of Human Sciences at the University of Western Australia, and University of Montreal, University of Ottawa and the DZNE (German Center for Neurodegenerative Disease) at Charité Berlin; 3D Bioprinting 2022-2023, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec; portrait of artist.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

July 3, 2023

This week we recognize    Christopher KennChristopher Kennedy,  and  his career as an artist and designer bringing attention to environmental stewardship through civic engagement. 

The Field Guide to Mushrooms in New York City (above) was created in 2012, and is an introduction to hunting for wild mushrooms. "Come along with us and explore the latent potential of the fungi kingdom in New York City! HUNT for mushrooms in the city with the help of this guide. This publication was created as part of the Queens Arts Express, an annual spring arts festival is packed with arts exhibitions, festive events, and live performances in public spaces throughout neighborhoods clustered along the 7 train route. The MycoMap project is a collaboration between: Strataspore, the Urban Landscape Lab, Sarah Williams of the Spatial Information Design Lab, Anne Yen Illustrator, Erica Schapiro-Sakashita, and Networked Organisms and their Habitats."

 click images for more info

“Chance Ecologies,” 2015 (above) is a framework for artistic gestures and research projects exploring the un-designed landscapes and wilderness found in abandoned spaces, post-industrial sites, and landfills. The main trajectories of the project are to create research and discourse around the value of wild spaces in the urban environment; to document, learn from, and commemorate the naturally occurring ecosystems that are being lost to development; and to articulate contemporary readings of and new forms of relating to (urban) wilderness. Chance Ecologies began investigating its first project site, Hunter’s Point South, Queens, in the summer of 2015, with a group of 20 international artists creating research-based arts projects documenting and mapping this site, working with materials on site, and creating photo & video on site.”

“The Environmental Performance Agency’s Multispecies Care Survey,2017 (above)was a public engagement and data gathering initiative meant to provoke and articulate forms of environmental agency that de-center human supremacy and facilitate the co-generation of embodied, localized plant-human care practices. This work was a continuation of the EPA’s work in response to the dismantling of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the 2016-2020 presidential administration. With this project, the collective asked for public input: In a time of pandemic crisis, how do we re-value what care means for all living beings? An online survey and series of protocols, as well as facilitated Multispecies Community Care Circles were presented. The data gathered through this survey is meant to work towards drafting a new piece of policy, The Multispecies Act. This Act aims to offer a set of embodied, actionable principles for centering spontaneous urban plant life as one means (among many) of contending with the failure of our environmental regulatory apparatus to deliver policy that protects and values life both human and non-human.”

“Suit Up: Join the Emergent Plantocene Clean-Up,” 2019 (above) was a  project and installation for the exhibition The Department of Human and Natural Services at NURTUREart. EPA Embodied Scientist Training was a call to participate in a multispecies coalition of embodied scientists, activists, and spontaneous plants who are re-imagining federal policy and agency in the face of imminent climate crises and mass extinction. In response to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s unprecedented rollback of 75+ federal environmental rules and regulations the EPA Embodied Scientist Training is a call to intimate action! The installation featured a training video, suggested fieldwork scores, and the needed gear and equipment to hit the streets as an EPA agent and gather first hand experience collecting environmental data and performing an emergent Plantocene clean-up.”

Glyphosate is one of the most common herbicides, first developed by chemist Henry Martin in the 1950s for the company Cilag. It was not widely used until 1974 when Monsanto (acquired by Bayer in 2018) brought it to market under the brand name “Roundup.” At Kennedy’s home in Austin, Texas he is woken up daily by the sounds of lawn mowers and ground crews spraying glyphosate on nearby lawns even though there is little vegetation left to manage in the wake of a multi-year drought. Fed up by the lack of “weedy resistance” in his own neighborhood, he created “No War on Plants,” in 2022, as a simple silkscreen print meant to be wheat-pasted along the streets of Austin. The work is a direct commentary on the complexities of industrial agriculture and the petro-chemical companies that feed their continued growth.

Christopher Kennedy is the associate director at the Urban Systems Lab, The New School and lecturer in the Parsons School of Design. Kennedy’s research focuses on the social-ecological benefits of urban plant communities, and the role of civic engagement in developing new approaches to environmental stewardship and nature-based resilience. As artist-designer Kennedy creates site-specific projects that examine conventional notions of “Nature,” interspecies agency, and biocultural collaboration. Drawing from a background in environmental engineering, Kennedy re-imagines field science techniques and new forms of storytelling to develop embodied research, installations, sculptures, and publications that recontextualize social-ecological systems. Kennedy has worked collaboratively on projects shown at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the Levine Museum of the New South, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, the Ackland Art Museum and the Queens Museum. He holds a BS in Environmental Engineering from RPI, a MA in Environmental Conservation Education from NYU and a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina. www.christopherkennedy.com

Featured images (top to bottom):©Christopher Kennedy, A Field Guide to Mushrooms in New York City, 2012, published in 2014 on ISSUU; Chance Ecologies, 2015, Hunters Point, South Queens; Multispecies Care Survey, 2017, specimens collected in Central Park; Suit Up: Join the Emergent Plantocene Clean-Up, 2019, included in exhibition titled The Department of Human and Natural Services, curated by Mariel Villeré at NURTUREart; No War on Plants, 2022, silkscreen print (free PDF download), Austin Texas, as pictured in Earthkeepers Handbook, published June 2023; Portrait of Artist.

July 2023 e-Newsletter for subscribers is here

“Overbooked,” New Jersey, Kate Dodd

Remnants Returned to the Public in Beautified Forms: Kate Dodd's Upcycling Installation Project

Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein

Kate Dodd fights waste with ideas manifested into public installations. Whether the work is discarded paper and books transformed into interactive and dynamic biomimicking structures or additions to natural environments, it is community-oriented. Through subtle metaphor, she challenges her audience to open their perspective on both their surroundings and histories. Her work is currently exhibited at the Bay Ridge public art exhibition in Brooklyn, NYC until the 11th of July.

“Through an Ecological Lens”, Bay Ridge, 73rd Street Public Library, Brooklyn, NYC, Kate Dodd

Kate, I admire your resourcefulness. When I see the materials that you use in your work, I think of the remnants of processed natural materials that are integrated into urban landscapes (books, packaging, etc). What is it about the materials you choose and how people interact with waste materials that influence your practice most?

I have always had a tremendous fascination with materials and making. So when I see materials being disposed of without much thought, whether in the trash stream or as individual bits of litter, I see both treasure and mistreatment, and feel an immediate need to resurrect the neglected and disrespected. These resurrections stand as a metaphor for people as well, but this is much easier to do with discarded materials. I want people to see their surroundings more fully and to sensitize them to their actions and relationships with both humans and materials.

I choose to work with paper based products, as opposed to plastic. This is something I have been learning about the last few years.  As indestructible as plastic is, it is highly decay-able, which presents certain problems when using this material outdoors. Paper, on the other hand, is an instant indoor material, and infinitely flexible.

“Through an Ecological Lens,” Bay Ridge, 73rd Street Public Library, Brooklyn, NYC, Kate Dodd

Like the paper installation in Bay Ridge where you integrate the local community into your process of creative development. What has been most rewarding and challenging about working with the community your work is serving?

Diversity of interactions and reactions, getting to understand a community more intimately, breaking down my own cynicism about the possibility of people working together, have been some of the top benefits. When you work with a community, you get to be a part of it, and feeling part of a community is a joyous thing. Working with a specific landscape - in this case, a community of trees - brings similar joy on every level.

As far as challenges go, communicating with a wide array of people is complicated. It can be hard to know who to reach out to, how to motivate people to respond, and accepting interpretations of directions that are different from your own interpretations. These are the same concerns that come with many jobs.

“Through an Ecological Lens,” Bay Ridge, 73rd Street Public Library, Brooklyn, NYC, Kate Dodd

And you seem to account for ideas and perspectives through creative writing as both content and tool. What effect are you able to achieve when using text as a structural visual format?

The text I incorporate is often “factual”, content from reference materials, or former sources of “truth”. I’m interested in how much reference sources reveal about the cultural context of their time, often in striking contrast to contemporary understanding of the same issues.  We question how much we value information when the information is revealed to be biased at best.

“Before Brick City,” cut paper installation, 800’ long commercial window space, Kate Dodd

So, you use text-as-structure to serve the purpose of revealing untold stories. One way you do this through the installation in Bay Ridge is by building books for visitors to interact with. What are you mindful of when choosing what to share and how?

I often look for words or phrases that reveal contradictions or open holes between my experience and the experience being presented in the text. Because the text I incorporate is often out of order or missing words, the remaining text allows for innuendo, assumption, and hybrid concepts. The use of text also reflects themes of internal thought and experience that each individual gathers, stores, digests, transforms, and then might put back into the world as a consumer of written content. I like leaving room in the gaps for the reader to fill.  Like a mad lib in a way.

“Free Verse,”,10’ x 20’ x 20’, printed vinyl on cut polycarbonate, Redwood City Public Library Children’s Room, Kate Dodd

I used to love mad libs! It is inspiring how you are using these implied metaphors. What struck me in a description of another found-object installation (Boxes & boxes) is your description: “building with these materials adds to my understanding of evolution; many small parts that are propelled by some sort of life force to combine and grow. I think of each installation as a landscape, or an ecosystem, each material with a specific role to play.”  What role do ecological themes play in your upcycling process?

I seem to perpetually try to create the illusion of life and movement with inanimate objects.  The beauty that is basic to movement is missing in objects. Some part of me always wants to redeem these "dumb",  but innocent objects and lift them into a more beautiful and dynamic place. 

I also see the illusion of movement as an indicator of the unavoidable presence and future impact of producing so much waste.  When I can create these illusions out of disposable products, it’s an attempt to control the uncontrollable, to orchestrate or redirect the impending disaster of accumulated waste that I’m constantly aware of. 

“Flotation Device Series,” Seagull Rock, Kate Dodd

And waste is not only an urban problem! Your practice approaches this through public art installations and interventions in more rural natural environments (ex. Flotation device series, Ebb & Flow: Claim it). How does your process change when working creating “landscapes” in urban environments versus exploring the human-hand in natural environments? Does your audience approach your work differently?

Generally speaking, people are more protective and less welcoming of interventions in non-urban settings. While I'm not aware of approaching my audience differently, one of the main things that seems to impact the reception of my work is the audience’s sense of territoriality and familiarity. If the site I’m working with has less visible human interaction, aka what we think of as nature, then I may get a more visceral, and negative reaction. The other inhabitants of that space have a more fixed idea of what a disruption looks like, even though they themselves may be having greater impact on the given site than my artwork does. In some ways, city dwellers are used to having public institutions, such as libraries and parks, host a variety of interventions. And in urban settings, where there is often a tremendous amount going on,  viewers might feel more free to ignore you, or see public space as less pure than nature, so new things are absorbed more readily.

"False Spring," 10’ x 16’ x 11’, plastic bottles, plastic netting, Baird Community Center, South Orange, New Jersey, Kate Dodd

Thank you, Kate!

Moraine/Terminal outdoor classroom for “Over the Levee, Under the Plow,” a mobile seminar co-organized by Nicholas Brown, Ryan Griffis and Sarah Kanouse. Gathering space features banners by Dylan A.T. Miner (Metis) and a desk and library by Jon Lund, 2019.

Notes on Art and Spatial Justice

What does spatial justice look like, affirmatively - not just as the absence of injustice?

by Sarah Kanouse

This question has been ever-present for me in the past year as I’ve been on sabbatical, freed from the daily academic tasks of teaching and service to reflect on past work and plant new creative seeds. I’ve also facilitated a reading group on the concept of spatial justice for faculty across art, architecture, and law whose guiding principle has been this implicit question. It asks for a grounded definition of spatial justice, one rooted in practice as well as theory, in vision as well as critique. It asks for a utopian mode, one that academics are generally disinclined to indulge. Our reading group usually demurred from offering an affirmative vision of justice, preferring to sculpt in relief – chiseling out the injustice – rather than build with clay, shaping the moist, resistant stuff of the world into something between vision, affordance, and capability. I use these sculptural metaphors intentionally: a year’s worth of meetings on spatial justice has convinced me that art has a lot to offer in both envisioning and pursuing spatial justice. 

The concept of spatial justice has intellectual roots in a particular academic tradition: Marxism as adopted since the 1960s by mostly British and American academic geographers trying to make sense of the radically “uneven development” (to borrow the title from Neil Smith’s influential book) evident in both the cities of the metropole and between the metropole and its (post-) colonies under conditions of “late” capitalism. A younger generation of Indigenous activist geographers have both used and critiqued this tradition to speak to the settler colonial dimensions of capitalist spatiality, but academic conversations around spatial justice remain boxed in by what anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli calls “settler liberalism:” the seemingly transparent and rules-based system of settler sovereignty whose asymmetrically violent outcomes can only be critiqued and/or ameliorated, but never in ways that challenge that sovereignty. However, the foundational injustice of the Anglophone settler colonies stems from the unjust occupation and expropriation of land–an occupation underwritten by the presence of non-Native people, including those who may themselves be oppressed, exploited, or historically denied personhood to begin with. True spatial justice–including for those whose very presence sustains the system which exploits us–cannot be achieved without the restoration of governance by enduring Indigenous principles, with the leadership of Indigenous people. 

Beyond such general statements, a decolonial vision of spatial justice is hard to articulate and even harder to achieve. Five hundred years of colonization cannot be simply rolled back like a soiled carpet to reveal an intact “Indigenous system of governance” ready for a quick sand-and-polish. Such a unified system never existed – and wanting to implement one “at scale” may be just another way of “seeing like a [settler]” state,” to channel James C. Scott. Moreover, settler colonialism and racial capitalism are world-making and subject-making enterprises: there is no outside, or above, or below. They have done such incalculable and intentional damage to the existence of other ways of feeling, sensing, thinking, and being that many of the concepts available to organize against them are entangled to some degree. But because they are encoded, however ambivalently, in who we understand ourselves to be, the tools by which subjectivity is sculpted and expressed–art, music, literature, ritual–are indispensable to both the articulation and pursuit of spatial justice.

“Beyond Property” prompt cards and artists book by Sarah Kanouse for “Over the Levee, Under the Plow: an experiential curriculum, co-organized by Kanouse and Ryan Griffis, 2019-2021.

Subjectivity in the Western liberal tradition is structured around the various forms of property that arose with the modern era and are entangled with the origins of capitalism. As a primary means of mediating social relations, property divides the world into subjects and objects: subjects who have rights and objects that (largely) do not. Historically, those classified as legal or potential property - enslaved African and Native people–formed the constitutive outside of the liberal subject and, indeed, of humanity itself. The liberal subject’s political rights were initially contingent on holding property in land; later, this proprietary requirement expanded to include “property in oneself” (e.g. not being indentured or enslaved or, for many centuries, female). Enforcing private property regimes on Indigenous territory served both as a mechanism of land seizure and means of assimilation, and adopting individual ownership models (or pretending to) was at various moments a precondition for the limited forms of political recognition extended by the liberal state. Yet even though chattel slavery and Native dispossession are rightly decried by today’s adherents to the liberal political tradition, political and subjectivity is still expressed and often experienced as what C.B. McPherson classically termed “possessive individualism.” The individual artist developing a signature style that both differentiates and unifies their work to appeal to collectors exemplifies the operations of proprietary individualism in the arts. However, the model is capacious enough to include artists (like myself) differentiated as much by the critical insights we offer as the objects we produce. Under settler liberalism, property–in its many and shifting forms–has become the relation that structures all other relations, the primary means of self- and community actualization, the dominant way of relating to self and world.

Holding liberalism to its aspirational values has helped to move ever more entities from the ‘object’ to the ‘subject’ side of the ledger, and increasingly immaterial forms of “proprietary interest” allow newly acknowledged subjects to exercise agency, as the “rights of nature” movement is attempting to do. For an Indigenous tribe to successfully sue for the return of land lost through treaty abrogation, for a Black family dispossessed by urban renewal to receive compensation, for a court to recognize a river’s possessive interest in remaining unpolluted–these are stunning victories for spatial justice within the paradigm of the liberal settler state. And yet they also shore up property and proprietary liberalism as solutions to the problems they created, a colonial tautology that gets us ever further from the vision of the settler state’s eventual replacement with a system of governance based on enduring Indigenous principles, under the leadership of Indigenous people.

Such a vision cannot be crafted only by artists, particularly artists as recognized within settler liberalism. But we are skilled in crafting aesthetic experiences where recognition and, alternatively, disidentification are possible. By making public our efforts to disentangle from proprietary subjectivity–particularly through relational accountability and active engagement with Indigenous leadership–we can contribute to a broader cultural shift. Moreover, my conversations with social-justice academics and movement-based activists over the last year have convinced me that art and artists have something to offer beyond the vague (if essential) work of “imagining otherwise” or “shifting the narrative.” By both training and orientation, we understand that tools shape both process and outcome: they make worlds while meeting goals. This insight is as true for the tools of law, activism, and policy as it is for more conventional creative tools. Thinking both reflexively and improvisationally about methods allows us to respond to the world that our actions are shaping, not just to the one we seek to replace. 

Some of the most visionary and effective projects advancing decolonial visions of spatial justice have been developed as community-focused collaborations involving lawyers, activists, artists and culture bearers. Programs, like the Oakland, CA-based Shuumi, ask non-Indigenous people to pay a voluntary “tax” to Indigenous-led organizations as a means of recognizing Native sovereignty and building capacity for land rematriation. Although legible within the settler-colonial framework of property taxes, the contributions also reflect the payment of tribute as a form of sovereign recognition, as practiced by many tribes prior to colonization. At least a half-dozen similar programs have launched across the United States. New community land trusts are forming that return land to Indigenous control while also meeting the needs of diverse communities for food and housing. Recognizing that Indigenous stewardship is the most effective means of environmental protection, property owners are donating land to Native-led land trusts at ever-greater numbers; such transfers are an opportunity to write into the title deed language acknowledging the colonial dimensions of ownership while taking them off the speculative real estate market forever. Other individuals and nonprofits are creatively using the “easements” of settler property law to permanently safeguard Indigenous stewardship and access to culturally significant landscapes. In Washington, a new spirit easement campaign asks property owners to permanently codify a welcome to the spirits of Indigenous Methow ancestors with the Registrar of Deeds. While this particular easement appears largely symbolic, it reflects a broader collective effort to sustain other ways of living in and with the land, incommensurable with Western cosmology. These and other efforts may not “look like” art in the traditional sense (indeed, they might look more like a title search), but they get us involved in the messy, halting, uncertain work of aligning the systems that govern of our lives with a broader, decolonial vision of justice.

“Ecologies of Acknowledgment” letterpress print with text by Nicholas Brown, Sarah Kanouse and Elizabeth Solomon (Massachusetts), printed at Huskiana Press by David Medina, 2019.

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MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

June 26, 2023

This week we recognize Kellie Bornhoft  Kellie Bornhoft, and her multimedia work exploring climate change and its effects on the natural environment.

From Here to There as Place (Readings from Alexander Wilson), 2015(above)is a single channel video recorded from the inside of a car driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway between Tennessee and North Carolina. This work layers footage taken from multiple passenger. Some of the clips are reversed and the duration is altered. During the drive the narrator reads sections from Alexander Wilson's book "The Culture of Nature" that reference the controversial construction of the road. 

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Burnishings, 2018-ongoing (above) is a series of drawings made with forest fire burned bark as charcoal. The process involves visiting public lands scarred by fire and collecting small bits of charcoal. As Bornhoft travels to any public land thereafter, she identifies native species of trees and rubs the found charcoal across the paper placed up against the tree’s bark. The work is about reciprocity and touch in spaces otherwise driven by narratives of preservation and “leave no trace”. The work seeks intimacy and tangibility with the hopes of fertilizing and caring for native species in these spaces. Dust and bits of charcoal drop to the base of the tree as a sort of good-will offering. As the “public” stewarding these lands, she is curious about individual responsibility within one’s environment and rejecting estranged colonial ideologies.

Shifting Landscapes: Static Bounds (above), published in 2019, is a field guide that brings into question what it means to preserve a landscape for “the enjoyment of future generations,” when climactic forecasts predict that those generations will be fighting just to survive on this melting planet. The two notions cannot coincide in one narrative. Public lands drew Bornhoft in because of the myths imposed on them: myths of preserving an inhuman wilderness, myths of innocence in the histories of their conquering, and myths of their stability amidst a warming planet. The book accumulates field notes, images, and a de-territorialized mapping system to locate the reader within the traversed time and space.

By a Thread, 2023 (above) is a celebration of the Endangered Species Act, the most effective environmental legislation for the past 50 years. Though few animals have been delisted, most species avoided extinction because of the legal protection. This collection of drawn plants and animals depicts every species ever federally listed as endangered under the ESA that resides or resided within a 30-mile radius of my studio on the unceded territory of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. Viewers are invited to gently sift through and touch the banners. The accompanying guide can assist in identifying species throughout the installation. The photographs referenced for the illustrations are sourced from the Creative Commons and often taken by citizen scientists. This guide credits the source image photographers with gratitude. The ESA has a history of embracing citizen science by allowing anyone to petition to list a species to the Fish and Wildlife Service. The illustrations were returned to the Creative Commons to increase accessibility and aid further study.

Bornhoft's most recent installation titled Tremors, 2023 (below) presented six speakers buried beneath one ton of sand, which amplifies a live seismic activity. Using an open-source ObsPy code and a Max patcher, the work synthesizes local seismic data into a sound wave that spatially varies between the six speakers. Viewers are invited to traverse the mound to feel the low grumbling vibrations of magnified Earth movements. Small porcelain rocks are mixed into the locally sourced sand. Installed with the work is a two-channel video. As a chance-operation poem, words borrowed from geology texts loop on each monitor at differing speeds to create an endless cycle of combinations. The intention is to bridge one’s understanding of how their presence on this moving-shaking planet is in flux—that the ground we think is static shifts beneath our feet. 

Kellie Bornhoft's (she/her) practice seeks tangible and poetic narratives needed in an ever-warming climate. Bornhoft utilizes sculpture, installation and video to delve into the whelms and quotidian experiences of our precarious times. Scientific data and news headlines do plenty to evince the state of our warming planet, but the abject realities of such facts are hard to possess. Through geological and more-than-human lenses, Bornhoft sifts through shallow dichotomies (such as natural/unnatural, here/there, or animate/inanimate.) Bornhoft is currently working in the Bay Area of California. She holds a MFA in Sculpture + Expanded Media from Ohio State University and a BFA from Watkins College of Art and Design. Bornhoft’s work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and film festivals such as the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina, Kulturanker in Magdeburg, Germany, and the Athens International Film and Video Festival. Bornhoft’s work has been reviewed in many publications including Frieze Magazine, Burnaway, INDYweek and ArtsATL.     www.kelliebornhoft.com

Featured images (top to bottom):©Kellie Bornhoft, From Here to There as Place (Readings from Alexander Wilson), 2015,single channel video, 4 min 31 sec; Burnishings, 2018-Ongoing, charcoal on paper, 200+ 11” x 14” drawings, dimensions variable (about 20’ x 9’ in the depicted installation); Boundless Sediments, 2020-2021, Two-Channel video, 11:53, plaster, TVs, speakers, wood, foam, and pigment; By a Thread, 2023, digital print on voile fabric, wood, 3D printed hardware; Tremors, 2023, speakers, amplifier, monitors, sand, porcelain, Python/ObsPy code, Max patcher, and cables; Portrait or Artist.