ARTISTS
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Brandon Ballengée, Vaughn Bell/Sarah Kavage/Nicole Kistler, Mark Brest van Kempen, Center for Tactical Magic: Aaron Gach, Xavier Cortada, EcoArtTech: Christine Nadir/Cary Peppermint, Erica Fielder, Ozzie Forbes, Futurefarmers, Fritz Haeg, Amy Howden-Chapman, Basia Irland, Scot Kaplan, Carolyn Lambert, Robin Lasser, Kathryn Miller, Matthew Moore, Eve S. Mosher, Andrea Polli/Joe Gimore with scientific collaborator Dr. Patrick Market, Rapid Response: Christina Cobb/Peter Fend/Julia Fischer/William Meyer, Tod Seelie, Austin Shull, Brooke Singer/Brian Rigney Hubbard, Social Sculpture Research and Unit-Earth Agenda: James Reed/Shelley Sacks, The Society for a Subliminal State: Carrie Dashow/Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg, Anne-Katrin Spiess, Chris Sollars, State of Progress (Carissa Carman/Joanna Lake), Temescal Amity Works (Susanne Cockrell/Ted Purves)
Brandon Ballengée
Bio
Exploring the boundaries between art, science, and technology, Brandon
Ballengée creates multidisciplinary works out of information generated
from ecological field trips and laboratory research. Since 1996,
Ballengée has collaborated with numerous scientists to conduct primary
biological research and Ecological Artworks. These activities were
outlined in Ecoventions, a book published in 2002 by the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati.
Project Description
This trans-disciplinary project began in 2006, when New York artist
Brandon Ballengée was commissioned by the Arts Catalyst to conduct
biological field-research into the health of British amphibians. Within
a week, the artist began finding dozens of unusual English toads at a
site in Yorkshire, England. Following these initial surveys, several
sites have been found with deformed frogs, toads, and newts. Working in
scientific collaboration with Richard Sunter, these findings are the
first description of high occurrences of amphibian malformation at
sites in England. The art and science research team is still
investigating the possible causes.
In what he calls “Eco-actions”, the artist invites the public to
participate in the scientific field-research. “As an artist and
activist, I believe the first step to environmental and social change
is interaction. By participating as a biologist and inviting the
public, I confront people with the ecology of their backyard. Sometimes
we find healthy species in functioning wetlands. Other times the
investigations uncover the effects of degradation. Like the site in
England, on the surface a scenic residential garden pond, a fabricated
vision of tranquility, yet containing monstrous environmentally
sculpted creatures. The experience is emotionally complex, often
uncanny, and hopefully changes people. These dual art and biology
projects are my attempt at sculpting society.”
Additionally, for the Malamp UK Project, the artist has collaborated
with Dr. Stanley Sessions at the Biology Department of Hartwick
College, NY to chemically ‘clear and stain’ the specimens which
illuminates the structure and complexity of each malformation.
Currently the artist is working with the Société des Arts
Technologiques, Montreal to experimentally scan each specimen for the
creation of a new series of scanner photographs and further scientific
analysis.
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Vaughn Bell, Sarah Kavage, and Nicole Kistler
Bios
Vaughn Bell is an artist and educator whose work focuses on our
attention and attachments to the environment. Her video art involves
meditative experiences that allow the viewer to slow down and endure a
subtle transition in the landscape. In her pieces such as Portable Environments, Landscape Adoptions, and Personal Biospheres
she has created humorous installations, actions, and objects that
reflect our need to possess, control, and care for our environment.
Often her work involves public interventions and performances or
includes sculptures of living material that require human maintenance.
In each case, whether, video, sculpture, or public performance, she
examines our personal relationships to the land we inhabit.
Sarah Kavage is a multidisciplinary artist and urban planner.
Her varied experience in project management, education, and community
outreach in collaborative and multidisciplinary settings has lead her
to develop a number of public and installation based art projects in
parallel to a body of two-dimensional work. She uses a variety of media
to explore the themes with which she is most interested – communication
and the transmission of information, the intersection between the
manmade and the natural, and all permutations of urban environments.
Her work is infused with social commentary, with a goal of
participation and genuine engagement with viewers
Nicole Kistler is a public artist who focuses on engaging people
in a deeper understanding of the living world. She prefers to work in
both places and media that are accessible to everyone. Kistler feels
she has created something successful when her work takes on a life of
its own. Whether that is providing a springboard for the ideas,
experiments, and energy of others, or allowing a natural process to run
its course. Through her narratives, Kistler exposes the folly of issues
for what they are, and introduces alternative viewpoints and
possibilities through humor. As a project manager in traditional public
involvement projects, she is interested in exploring the creative
process of art making and temporary art projects as a means of public
participation, as a process instead of a product. While often drawing
from her background in landscape architecture, she has found that art
allows people to engage in discussion while suspending tightly held
beliefs – to be amazed, surprised, and inspired
Project Description
The Watermark Project is a series of events and actions in which
we visualize, experience, and mark the potential future Seattle
waterfront-- a shoreline created when applying a 20 foot sea level rise
due to global warming to the current topography. The project is a
meditation and a demonstration on the need for action locally,
nationally, and globally to stem the tide of climate change. It is also
a chance to become more intimately connected with the terrain of
Seattle. While we cannot predict with certainty the extent of sea level
rise, the project aims to use imagination as a tool for coming to terms
with the impact climate change will have on the planet if no action is
taken to stop it.
For each performance, participants walk the line of the future
shoreline, sometimes marking it with different materials such as seeds
or water. For the first action, participants dressed in somber clothes
to walk the line, leaving a trail of black seeds (chosen for their
non-toxic and edible qualities) as they walked through downtown
Seattle. Designated participants provided handouts with maps of the
line and information on the projects to passersby. Subsequent actions
have involved marking the line with melting ice, as well as additional
performance walks along the line.
The walk occurred on Earth Day, April 21st, 2006, and on subsequent
days that summer as part of the exhibition Groundtruthing at SOIL
Gallery in Seattle.
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Mark Brest van Kempen
Bio
Mark Brest van Kempen has created a variety of pieces using the landscape itself as sculptural material. From the Free Speech Monument on the UC Berkeley campus to Land Exchange
at the National Academy of Art in China, his work explores the range of
emotions and issues that are embodied in our complex relationship to
the environment. He has spoken around the country and abroad on the
possibilities of creating artwork that functions outside the museum /
gallery context and that brings aesthetic and symbolic meaning to
everyday situations.
Project Description
Living From Land documents Mark Brest van Kempen’s thirty day
excursion into the wilderness of Colusa County. The artist brought no
food and subsisted directly on what he found within a five square mile
area. Brest van Kempen inverted the genre of landscape painting in an
effort to honor nature’s role as the source, setting, and savior. By
submerging himself within the context of these natural systems, the
artist draws attention to our collective impact on the land and the
ecological footprint we leave behind. This experience he said, “helped
me to realize a little more that our species is not the center of the
world.”
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Center for Tactical Magic: Aaron Gach
Bio
Though associated with numerous groups including the American Red
Cross, Earth First!, and the Black Panthers, Aaron Gach is best known
for his position as co-founder of the Center for Tactical Magic (CTM).
Established in 2000, this Berkeley-based organization is committed to
the activation of latent energies toward positive transformation. In
his work as a teacher, spokesman, and social leader, Gach makes a
conscious effort to combine the disciplines of art, design,
architecture, and community service.
Project Description
The Cricket-Activated-Defense System, designed in response to illegal
logging activity in California's threatened redwood forests, explores
interspecies collaboration in the fight to save endangered
environments. Relying on the crickets' unique audible responses to
human encroachment as well as their strategic positioning on the
logging routes, CADS establishes a system of deterrence through the
technological augmentation of natural systems. Serving both as a
critique of hegemonic logic and as a tactical tool for a disempowered
community, CADS redefines "biotech" within a political ecosystem.
The CADS Project, or cricket-missile system, consists of three main
components: the technology, the installation of the technology, and the
demonstration of the technology. The technology is an electronic device
that receives distressed cricket chirps and translates the sound into a
firing signal for anti-logger missiles. The device is a form of extreme
bioengineering that simply recombines consumer surveillance products
(essentially "bugging" devices) with model rockets - both trickle-down
goods from the military-industrial complex.
Installation of CADS typically takes place along logging roads
currently threatened by illegal logging. Crickets are the ideal
guardians of this area since they naturally take up the perimeter and
have evolved to transmit a very precise frequency should they feel
threatened by the encroachment of an invasive species. To avoid a
misfire, the system is activated only when a significant number of the
cricket population voice their consternation over a relatively broad
area.
By technologically augmenting the natural responses of crickets,
the success of CADS relies not only on interspecies collaboration but
also on the collective efforts of a greatly disempowered community.
This relationship is further highlighted in a public
lecture/demonstration in which attendees from various disciplines (art,
engineering, biology, environmental science, etc) gather to form an
academic ecosystem. The CADS presentation explores cricket morphology,
surveillance technology, and the political ecology of forestry before
culminating in a cricket-assisted demonstration launch. Afterwards, the
ensuing Q & A consistently encourages a lively discussion that
engages militaristic rhetoric, political obfuscation, and the polemics
of "violence" along with notions of creative resistance and
interdisciplinary social practices.
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Xavier Cortada
Bio
Xavier Cortada is a Cuban-American painter and the leader of
participatory art projects around the world. Honored for his work as
both an artist and a volunteer, Cortada has engaged in numerous
large-scale pieces and been commissioned to create art for the White
House, the World Bank, the Florida Supreme Court, the Florida
Governor's Mansion, Miami City Hall, the Miami Art Museum, the Museum
of Florida History and the South Pole Station. By exploring the paths
of those who came before him and his relationship to the natural world,
Cortada challenges his audience to find deeper meaning in their present
lives.
Project Description
Miami artist Xavier Cortada launched
Reclamation Project on Earth Day 2006, during the opening of a
month-long installation at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, Florida.
Volunteers collected mangrove seedlings from locations in Miami Dade
County, where they would otherwise perish, and distributed 2,500
seedlings to retail and commercial spaces in South Beach. During Fall
2007, volunteers collected thousands of red mangrove seedlings and
displayed them in clear, water-filled cups along the business corridors
of South Beach, reclaiming an island where they had thrived just a few
decades ago. In January 2008, seedlings were returned to the Miami
Science Museum to be planted along Biscayne Bay.
Mangroves once blanketed Miami Beach. As with many coastal areas of the
world, the mangroves of Miami Beach were decimated in the name of
progress and development. Globally, over 50% of the world's mangrove
forest has disappeared, and hundreds of acres of mangrove forest are
lost every year. Mangroves act as breeding grounds for juvenile fish
and rookeries for countless birds. Their roots stabilize the shore,
provide life-saving protection from the effects of hurricanes, and trap
pollutants within their sediment. They provide coves for fishing,
canoeing and recreation. Without mangroves, shorelines would
potentially suffer from erosion and endanger the species that need
mangroves for food and shelter.
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EcoArtTech: Christine Nadir and Cary Peppermint
Bios
Co-founded in 2005 by Christine Nadir and Cary
Peppermint, EcoArtTech works with digital, networked, and sustainable
technologies to create art that addresses the environmentality of
modern life. Drawing on a wide range of literary, artistic, and
theoretical fields, their aim is to imagine new, healthy, and
sustainable relationships between animals, humans, their environments
and technologies.
Cary Peppermint is a conceptual artist who works with
digital technologies and performance art. As an assistant professor of
art at Colgate University, Peppermint teaches courses in the theory and
practice of digital art. Peppermint is best known for his website
Restlessculture.net which serves as a platform for his ongoing series
of networked performances. His latest works engage the concepts of
wilderness, space, the American frontier, and environmental ethics.
Within these greater issues, Peppermint investigates how new media
technologies both limit and expand our conceptions of nature and the
environment. Cary has curated international exhibitions of digitally
infused eco-art. Cary designed these shows to ultimately question how
we live and make art with and within nature.
Christine Nadir is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University where she is completing her dissertation, entitled Need, Function, Nature: Social Ecology and the Principle of Organic Economy in Modern Environmental Literature and Thought.
Christine has taught courses on literature, theory, and expository
prose at Columbia University and as co-founder of EcoArtTech,
concentrates on the tension burgeoning in our world between the
constructed and the natural.
Project Description
A Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness is a
quicktime database of networked performance work made in the woods and
on rural back-lots. Begun in 2002, these eight performances document
the trials and tribulations of two New Yorkers living in the wilderness
for four months every year. The performances capture an attempt to
establish a functional home without running water, electricity, or
maintained roads. They develop relationships with locals; demystify the
romanticization of nature while re-learning humanity’s dependence on
the environment for survival; and research the environmental history of
the land and the surrounding area (its previous deforestation, its
logging, its near use for an auto salvage yard, its use as farmland and
grazing ground one hundred years ago, and its inhabitance by Native
Americans for millennia before that). This work presents a relatively
“natural” environment as a historical space and a place of performance.
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Erica Fielder
Bio
California-born artist Erica Fielder chooses to merges art-making
with lifestyle and the natural sciences. In her watershed-based
programs, Fielder works to promote a heartfelt shift to ecologically
ethical practices. Her art includes rituals, performances, mapping, and
object making. Fielder uses these diverse media to highlight the
importance of empathy in our modern world and encourage an integrated
relationship between humans and the blue-green earth.
Project Description
Artist and ecologist Erica Fielder created The Bird Feeder Hat
to facilitate a deeper relationship between mankind and the natural
world. The hat, made of paper-maché and twigs, incites a multi-sensory
experience that challenges all visual expectations.
Imagine sitting quietly in a secluded corner of a garden with a Bird
Feeder Hat on your head. Your hat brim is sprinkled with seeds and you
wonder how a bird on your head will feel. The twittering and rustling
in nearby shrubbery moves closer. Suddenly, with a tilt to your hat and
a surprisingly loud thump, a tiny finch lands. Through the drum-like
paper brim the sound of the bird pecking and hopping is magnified. You
discover that the bird whispers and mumbles to itself as it feeds and
then, bam, another bird lands. Although you cannot see the birds, some
other senses—touch, hearing, gravity, movement and smell— are on high
alert during this unforgettable experience.
Fielder used the hat as a way to engage the public in a discussion
about the local watershed. A watershed is a basin of land in which rain
falls, and while these include the whole system from mountain to sea,
each can be divided into smaller watersheds. Wearing one of Fielder’s
hats gave participants the chance to experience a wild animal up close
and to create sustainable interspecies relationships with members of
their local watershed. Fielder’s work is based on the idea that a
sensory experience creates a foundation of knowledge that will
ultimately make us better global citizens, and lead to better decision
making in regards to ecosystems. Fielder’s ultimate vision is that
watershed by watershed we begin to heal, and then sustain, the health
of our biosphere.
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Futurefarmers: Amy Franceschini, Jonathan Meuser, Stijn Schiffeleers, and Michael Swaine
Bios
Futurefarmers is a group of practitioners aligned through an
open practice of making socially relevant work. Founded in 1995 by Amy
Franceschini, the Futurefarmers are interested in the multidisciplinary
arenas of art, architecture, design, technology, science, and
sustainable environments. Comfortable in both traditional and new
media, the Futurefarmers employ a fertile approach to every project,
and through many collaborations, explore the relationship of concept
and creative processes.
Amy Franceschini is an artist and educator. She founded
Futurefarmers in 1995, as a means to bring together multidisciplinary
practitioners to create new work. In 2002, she founded Free-Soil She is
currently teaching Media Theory and Practice courses at Stanford
University and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Project Description
A small tent was placed in a public park
opposite the Boulder Museum in Boulder, Colorado. For two days
scientists from the National Renewable Energy Labs offered their time
to informally discuss their research and current energy concerns. The
tent and ensuing discussions were open to any visitor that showed an
interest.
After the first day of meetings, Futurefarmers found a common thread of
conversation that led to a fairytale framework for their future
dialogue. When a new group came together in the tent, they were asked
to consider the story of the Three Little Pigs under the thematic
umbrella of energy. The tent provided an opportunity for dynamic
discussions, combining professional research with the ideas of
non-scientists.
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Fritz Haeg
Bio
Like a system of crop rotation, Fritz Haeg works between
his architecture and design practice, Fritz Haeg Studio, the happenings
and gatherings of Sundown Salon, the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab,
and his role as an educator. After studying at the Istituto
Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and Carnegie Mellon, Haeg
taught at CalArts, Art Center College of Design, Parsons, and the
University of Southern California. His first book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, outlines his artistic philosophy and was published by Metropolis Books in February 2008.
Project Description
The Edible Estates project began as a part of GardenLab, a program
which was established by artist Fritz Haeg in 2001. GardenLab uses the
garden as a metaphor and a laboratory for ecology based initiatives in
art and design. Edible Estates emerged in 2005 as a project to replace
American front lawns with edible landscapes that respond to specific
cultures, climates, and people. Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #2,
Lakewood, CA was created at the Foti family’s home in Lakewood, a 1950s
housing development with typical suburban front lawns. The Lakewood
Edible Estate helped the Foti Family turn their front lawn into a place
for gardening and a site for experimentation. Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #4,
London, UK was commissioned by the Tate Modern museum. The artist
worked with families of the Southwark neighborhood of London to convert
the public lawn in front of their housing estate into a garden for food
production.
Edible Estates attacks the concept of the American lawn and attempts to
reconcile the issues of global food production and urbanized land use
through the domestic garden. Haeg views the project as a practical food
producing initiative, a landscape design proposal which responds to
each specific environmental context, a scientific horticultural
experiment, a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political
statement, a community out-reach program, and an act of radical
gardening.
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Amy Howden-Chapman
Bio
Amy Howden-Chapman is a New Zealand-based artist and writer. As one
half of the performance duo Raised by Wolves, Howden-Chapman actively
embraces environmentalism, emotion, form, and fun. Her inclusive
approach to artwork and its reception reflects her belief that
environmental issues can only be tackled by collective involvement from
society.
The Raised By Wolves manifesto currently states:
We are acted on by the environment; we are not actors.
We coexist rather than collaborate.
We value action and information equally.
Project Description
The Great Pacific Ocean Rubbish Patch Recreation took place in
Wellington, New Zealand on Saturday December 2nd 2006. An open-call was
extended to the public, encouraging everyone to engage in this public
performance. In an attempt to re-create the phenomenon of a massive
ocean gyre, the participants ran in an organized formation around a
field in the Prince of Wales Park. Representing rubbish trapped within
the gyre, these bodies mimicked the swirling currents involved in this
environmental issue. This public performance and its subsequent
documentation draw attention to the massive accumulation of trash in
our oceans.
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Basia Irland
Bio
Based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Basia Irland describes
herself as "a sculptor and installation artist, a poet and book artist,
and an activist in water issues." Her thoughtful interdisciplinary
projects combine beautiful craftsmanship, a fascination with research,
and a participative engagement with the viewer.
Basia Irland's work embraces the notion of artist as field researcher
and community activist. Through these roles, Irland draws attention to
the neglected water issues of the American Southwest. Through practical
water retaining landscaping projects, artist books, and her curious
wooden backpacks loaded with water samples and intricate maps, Irland
brings a high level of art and engagement to her task.
Project Description
A Gathering of Waters focuses on the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, which
flows out of Colorado, through New Mexico, and into the vast Chihuahuan
Desert. Beset by too many human controls and demands, the river can no
longer assure that water from the Rocky Mountain highlands will empty
into the Gulf of Mexico.
A Gathering of Waters was conceived as a symbolic carrying
of Rio Grande/Rio Bravo's waters from source to sea, to re-establish
people's connection with the river and with each other along its 1,875
mile length. A special canteen, called the River Vessel, was passed
downstream, from community to community, from hand to hand. Small water
samples were added from each community as hundreds of people extended a
hand upstream, received the vessel, added their own contribution of
water from the Rio, wrote in the log book, and passed these along to
another person downstream. Participants traveled with the River Vessel
and its accompanying log book by boat, raft, canoe, hot-air balloon,
car, van, horseback, truck, bicycle, mail and by foot — all the way to
the sea. The gathering and passing of the waters symbolically restored
a natural function of the river and generated enthusiasm, a sense of
continuity and a mutual understanding of riverside communities.
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Scot Kaplan
Bio
Scot Kaplan has lived and worked throughout the United States since
receiving his MFA in sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania.
Though unified in subject matter, his artwork ranges in form from
experiencial installation and multimedia collections, to interactive
performances and photographic documentation. Currently concerned with
the obliteration of natural elements in our increasingly constructed
world, Kaplan challenges his audience to become aware of these
processes and their far-reaching consequences. Today, as an assistant
professor of fine art at The Ohio State University, Kaplan resides in
Columbus, Ohio.
Project Description
Urban and suburban development, possibly more than any other single
cause, has led to the diminishment of the natural environment. This
development has altered not only the physical landscape but also our
perception and understanding of the environment as it naturally exists.
The denizens of these areas, however, have come to recognize the
desirability and need for “green spaces.” This has in turn led to the
creation of new, artificial, “natural” green spaces where naturally
occurring indigenous green spaces previously existed. Examples of this
obliteration and reconstruction exist in places such as Central Park in
New York City and in nearly every suburban front yard. It is through
the actions of man that this abatement of nature occurs and it is
actions in-kind that this project utilizes to bring this circumstance
to the public consciousness.
Weeding documents a series of actions during which the artist
reintroduced indigenous plants back into the urban environment. Kaplan
places plants and trees in spaces that make their reintroduction
aggressive in conspicuous and obtrusive ways. This approach challenges
people to be aware of the obliteration of these natural elements in
highly constructed and controlled environments. Some of these
reimpositions are ephemeral, such as placements in crosswalks or
doorways, and some use non-traditional spaces like street side
newspaper distribution boxes.These actions reintroduce otherwise
naturally occurring elements into artificially constructed environments.
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Carolyn Lambert
Bio
Carolyn Lambert’s work unravels social histories by playing,
re-enacting, and re-narrating these pieces in the public sphere. Often
collaborative, and always participatory, Lambert’s projects are
grounded in a dialogue based research practice. Prioritizing
experiences over objects, Lambert seeks to expand the bounds of
relational practices, performance art, social sculpture, and
documentary.
Lambert is particularly interested in the reciprocal ways that people
and environments shape each other. She is drawn to places of historical
tension, and the compelling challenges they contain. She explores sites
through planned actions, dialogues, and/or performances, and names the
process of revealing these stories, as the goal of her practice.
Deeply inspired by the actions, happenings, and life-art of the late
sixties and early seventies, she employs a more contemporary approach
to destabilize the relationship between artist and audience.
“Co-creation with audience participants” says Lambert “pushes the role
of art in society from embellishment and inspiration, to that of action
and mobilization.”
Project Description
The Ohio River Lifeboat Project was a three-and-a-half month
journey that explored and documented contemporary life on the Ohio
River. This experiment-in-living included a series of gatherings,
recorded interviews and regular updates to the project website. The
river, a communal place with many stakeholders, was the site and
subject; the interaction was the artwork. An eco-customized,
collaboratively built, pontoon houseboat carried a two-person crew down
the river and functioned as a sleeping, cooking and storage space. The
boat was both a mode of transportation, which offered access to banks,
islands and tributaries, and a means to fully integrate into river life
and culture. A solar panel, water filtration system (to make river
water potable), a grey water catchment system, and a small herb garden
made the Lifeboat an example of sustainable water living. The Lifeboat
hosted potluck dinners as forums for discussing the intersections of
recreation and commerce, culture and ecology on the Ohio River. The
artist swapped stories with towboat captains, swimmers, casino boat
pilots, commercial fishermen, power plant chemists, environmental
activists, small business owners, historians and museum docents.
Drawing on their personal stories and memories, Lambert initiated
discussions of the river as a shared space.
The Ohio River represents a thoroughfare, a natural resource, a
respite and source of recreation. Beginning in Pittsburgh, the Ohio
flows through six states – Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky,
Indiana and Illinois. The river is a drinking source for more than
three million people. Nine percent of total US energy from coal comes
from plants directly on the Ohio River. Over 230 million tons of cargo
is transported on its waters each year.
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Robin Lasser
Bio
Robin Lasser is a professor of art at San Jose State University. She
produces photographs, videos, public art, and site-specific
installations that deal with culturally significant themes. Often
working in a collaborative mode, Lasser values her relationships with
other artists, writers, students, public agencies, and community
organizations as opportunities to promote social dialogues. Best known
for Eating Disorders in a Disordered Culture, Lasser and her most extensive project have been published in numerous books, catalogs, newspapers, and journals.
Project Description
Robin Lasser was a visiting artist at the San Francisco Fill Company
from 2002 to 2003. There she produced a series of photographic and
video-based works which commented on the cycle of consumerism,
consumption and waste; processes that define much of contemporary
American culture.
Dining in the Dump is part one of a series of five videos
created at the San Francisco Fill Company. The piece focuses on our
insatiable appetites and compares them with the inner workings of one
of the largest sanitary fill companies in the United States.
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Kathryn Miller
Bio
Kathryn Miller a visual artist whose work is deeply rooted in
environmental issues, concepts, questions, and concerns. As a keen
observer of the natural world, Miller chose to pursue an undergraduate
degree in biology in an effort to better understand these complex
interactions. From biology she turned to ecology, botany, soil science,
and later art.
By combining these disciplines she has been able to follow a mutually
compatible scientific and artistic direction in her own work. She
actively collaborates with other artists and scientists to explore new
and more informed perspectives.
She is now a professor of art with an interdisciplinary emphasis in
environmental studies at Pitzer College. Through education she hopes to
inform and broaden the ways in which we view and perceive nature and
native habitats.
Project Description
Seed Bomb was a project that dispersed snowball-sized clusters
of dirt and native plants throughout the Santa Barbara area of
California. In an effort to help repopulate the landscape with
vegetation after a significant drought, Miller turned to this
non-violent form of environmental aggression. The clusters were made
from fertile soil, seeds and dextrin, a cornstarch derivative often
used as a binder in candy bars and cattle feed.
In the early 1990s, Santa Barbara, California went through an intense
five-year drought. Wildfires broke out and destroyed homes, businesses
and many of the non-native, water dependant plants. Seed Bomb
was an attempt to create artwork that would celebrate the beauty and
importance of the land as well as rejuvenate and work within its
natural systems. Once the drought broke, the “bombs” were realized and
released, spreading new, self-sustaining growth in the barren areas.
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Matthew Moore
Bio
Matthew Moore is the last of four generations to farm his family’s
land. Within five years, his home will be transformed into suburbia. As
a farmer and an artist, he displays the realities of this transition in
order to rationalize and document his displacement. The trials and
tribulations of American agriculture, its roles in contemporary
globalization, and its questionable ecological practices create a
foundation for his explorations. By displaying the past and future of
the farm, Moore has used his land to explore similarities between
commercial agriculture and suburbia, which reveal their social,
cultural and economic impacts locally, nationally and abroad.
Documenting the reality of land and appetite from agriculture to
suburbia, the decisions of our society reveal consumer models that make
us disobedient to our relationship with land and time. By exhibiting
this theater of evolution and loss, he has entered a historical
dialogue of displacement that reveals his part (in agriculture) in the
transformation of his family’s land and identity. Through his artwork,
he has looked at these dilemmas to reveal the impact of the American
dream on our society and the land as we transition towards a
post-agrarian nation.
Project Description
Rotations: Single Family Residence is the first in a series of
land artworks that address the issues of suburban encroachment. Moore
used his family’s fourth-generation farm, a twenty-acre field of barley
outside Phoenix, Arizona, as a canvas. Within this space, Moore marked
the outline of an enlarged floor plan using a hoe and a 400-foot string
for guidance. The design eliminated from this agricultural field
appears to be a vacant lot awaiting a single-family residence. Moore
commemorated the process of creating his floor plan with film. This
form of documentation, which is aptly referred to as the “hoe cam”,
explores the role farmers take in clearing land for future development.
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Eve S. Mosher
Bio
Eve Mosher is an American artist with an ardent environmental
sensibility. Concentrating on the constant struggle between human
progress and nature's survival, Mosher works to challenge the
delineation between the two. With a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental
Design and a Masters from Pratt, Mosher travels across the country,
producing pieces that abstractly explore the human condition.
In early 2006, Mosher embarked on a natural outgrowth of her
previous work. She decided to add to her practice, large-scale projects
that publicly engaged her audience in ecologically relevant issues.
Today, she produces works that inspire hope and positive action to
combat the severity that comes with climate change, toxic waterways,
and environmental economics.
Project Description
HighWaterLine was a public
performance and art piece inspired by the New York City waterfront.
Mosher designed this project to create a visual and local reaction to
the effects of climate change. For six months, Mosher traced the
10-feet above sea level on over 70 miles of coastline with blue chalk
and installed illuminated beacons in city parks. Today this chalk line
marks the areas that will suffer the most drastic flooding threatened
by climate change.
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Andrea Polli and Joe Gimore with scientific collaborator Dr. Patrick Market
Bios
Andrea Polli is a digital media artist living in New York City.
She is currently an associate professor of film and media at Hunter
College and working with atmospheric scientists to explore the
interdisciplinary field of sonification. Interested in global systems
and the real time interconnectivity of these systems, she directs her
studies towards the effect of these systems on the individual. As a
member of the steering committee for New York 2050, a wide-reaching
project envisioning the future of New York City, she is working with
environmentalist, historians and other experts to look at the impact of
climate on the future of human life. Polli's projects often bring
together artists and scientists from various disciplines, and in 2003
she was granted the UNESCO Digital Arts Award for her various efforts.
Joe Gimore is a sound artist living in Northern England. He is
the co-founder of rand()% a net radio station which streams real-time
generative music. His music has been released on several labels
including Line, Melange, and Alku.
Dr. Patrick Market is an assistant professor in the Department
of Soil, Environmental, and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of
Missouri. Interested in the areas of Synoptic and Mesoscale Dynamics,
he is currently funded by the National Science Foundation to develop a
forecasting procedure for convective snow events in the central United
States.
Project Description
The Arctic has experienced a dramatic warming trend over the last decade that may accelerate global climate change. N.
expresses the isolation and environmental extremes of this remote
region and addresses the importance of the Arctic to the global
ecosystem.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Arctic
research program provided data and images for this work. A portion of
the raw sound material used in N.
comes from live sferics (short for atmospherics), electromagnetic
transmissions of lightning from the INSPIRE VLF (very low frequency)
receiver at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. N. also makes use of a custom, open source object for Max/MSP called Datareader, created by Andrea Polli and Kurt Ralske.
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Rapid Response: Christina Cobb, Peter Fend, Julia Fischer and William Meyer
Bio
Rapid Response is a four-person team of conceptual art activists.
Founded in 1999 by Christina Cobb, Peter Fend, Julia Fischer, and
William Meyer, Rapid Response concentrates on promoting a new,
eco-friendly fuel supplier: the Post-Petroleum Gas Station. With its
sharp logo, illuminated signs, mock pumps and architectural drawings,
this practical, and rather satiric project sells non-fossil energy
sources like ethanol, hydrogen, electricity, and methane. In addition
to this visionary piece, Rapid Response has exhibited in shows such as
News Room, Global Warming sign, and Environmentally Concerned I and II.
Project Description
After a deadly heat wave in the summer of 1999 was attributed to global
warming, a group of artists focused their attention on the world’s
largest retail suppliers of fuel: the oil companies. They decided to
launch a brand called Rapid, intended to compete head to head with
fossil fuel. Using the words “Global Warming” on light box signs
similar in style to the retail oil companies’ logos, Rapid Response set
up parodies that emphasized the obvious results of abusing the products
being sold.
Mobil Global Warming was an extension of agit-prop activity
undertaken by the collective Rapid Response in support of the urgent
need to rapidly deploy non-fossil fuel based re-fueling stations. For
this project, Rapid Response teamed up with Critical Mass to show
popular support for non-fossil fuel based transportation. These
photographs were taken on Earth Day at a Mobil fueling station in the
Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The “Global Warming” light box sign
was carried to the Chelsea Station by a human powered bike trailer with
the Rapid Response team in tow. As the Rapid team approached the
station from the south, Critical Mass riders numbering around 100
descended from the north. The Rapid team whisked the Global Warming
sign onto the pumps while the riders surrounded the station.
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Tod Seelie
Bio
Tod Seelie, the 2002 recipient of the Pratt Travel Grant, has traversed
the world. Photographed in fifteen countries and on five different
continents, Seelie’s stunning pictures chronicle the wild lives and raw
vistas of the international DIY counterculture. His images speak of the
energy of youth, the quirkiness that exists in every town, the quiet
moments, the bruises, and the blood. These photographs, which range
from protests and portraits to mosh pits and desolate landscapes,
express his love affair with danger and his work as a relentless
observer.
Project Description
A group of approximately thirty performers and artists from all over
the country gathered in Minneapolis to construct a flotilla of rafts
that would journey down the Mississippi River. They built them out of
salvaged garbage, designed the motors to run on grease, and harnessed
wind and solar power to use aboard the rafts. For two subsequent
summers, Miss Rockaway Armada floated
down the Mississippi and stopped in towns along the way to host musical
performances, vaudeville theater, workshops, and to teach communities
about sustainable travel. The photographs of Tod Seelie document this
epic journey.
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Austin Shull
Bio
Brooklyn-based artist, Austin Shull uses his work to lament the
detached state of the world and communicate his desire for change.
Through forms of personal protest, Shull resists capitalist ideology
and presents alternative solutions for the consumer market. He offers
examples of self-sufficiency; actions that may very well be required in
the future. At the core of his work is a response to the “era of
uncertainty”. As Shull looks to the future, he encourages his audience
to challenge traditional support systems. He encourages them to engage
in the creation of sustainable relationships and the balance of
humanitarian and environmental concerns.
Project Description
Digging for Water is a two-channel video documenting the act of
hand digging a well. Equipped with a shovel and pick axe, the artist
dug into an area of land for three days until he hit water. Throughout
the digging process, Shull drank 1.5 liter bottles of Poland Spring
water, which was then filled up with the well water. The resulting
video shows both actions: digging and filling the bottles with water.
As capitalism continues to increase the distance between labor and
sustenance, this action presents the relationship between human energy
expenditure and basic elements such as water needed for survival.
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Brooke Singer and Brian Rigney Hubbard
Bios
Brooke Singer is a digital media artist, educator, and curator.
Her projects reflect her interest in the effects of evolving, digital
networks on experience in the physical, lived-in world. Singer has
exhibited and lectured in the U.S. and internationally, including at
the Andy Warhol Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The
Neuberger Museum of Art, The Banff Centre for the Arts, Biennale de
Montréal, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. With NYC
wireless Singer co-produced the "Art in the Wireless Park" events,
bringing net art off the screen and into public spaces. Throughout her
career, Singer has received numerous commissions to explore and blur
the borders between science, technology, politics, and arts practices.
Brian Rigney Hubbard 's experience as a Director of Photography
extends through feature, commercial and documentary work. A graduate of
New York University’s Film Program, Hubbard, is now represented by
Gersh Agency and has received international recognition. In addition to
being awarded Best Cinematography at the Elektrozine 2000 Festival and
the Semana del Cine Festival 2000, Hubbard has screened at other venues
such as Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, Telluride, Independent Feature
project (IFP), the Whitney Biennial, Tribecca, and Berlin.
Project Description
800 Steps Apart is a video triptych that compares two opposing
protocols endorsed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to
handle cleanup in Lower Manhattan post-September 11. In the first
scene, a Russian émigré, living at 300 Albany Street, explains that the
Red Cross, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the EPA
told her to return to her apartment two weeks after 9/11 to clean the
dust and debris with a bucket and mop. The second scene depicts the
former Deutsche Bank building corporation negotiating with federal
agencies and lawyers to determine the proper protocol for debris
cleanup. A third frame connects these two stories by showing a woman
walking back and forth between the two sites in Lower Manhattan, which
takes barely five minutes on foot.
800 Steps Apart is part of a larger documentary project by
Hubbard and Singer about communities affected by toxic contamination,
abandoned by the EPA, and in search of responsive, environmental
leadership.
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Social Sculpture Research and Unit-Earth Agenda: James Reed and Shelley Sacks
Bios
Shelley Sacks is an interdisciplinary artist working to shape
and promote a humane and sustainable way of life. After graduating from
the University of Cape Town in 1972, Sacks studied in Germany with
Joseph Beuys. Since 1990 she has been based in the UK working with
other artists, such as James Reed, to develop the Social Sculpture
Research Unit (SSRU) and Earth Agenda (EA). Her political, cultural and
artistic experience across cultures, countries and disciplines is
manifest in her new artistic strategies and innovative pedagogic.
James Reed is a South African artist who has recently completed
his Masters in Social Sculpture on a British Council Chevening
Commonwealth Scholarship. During this period of study, Reed worked
closely with Shelley Sacks on the development of social sculpture
projects. In October 2007 James returned to South Africa to work with
the climate change kit, Agents of Change.
Reed’s work relies on a series of strategies that originate from life
processes: listening, reflecting, discussing, caring; making space
together that allows for thinking and reconnection to our knowing (an
approach arising from the pedagogic practices developed in the SSRU).
His practice can be seen as an emerging of soul; creative strategies to
facilitate conscious interconnection, to activate a sense of inner
necessity and an image of wholeness.
Project Description
Agents of Change (AoC) is a kit that can be used by groups of up to
twenty-five people to initiate discussions on concerns, questions and
hopes for sustainability and climate change. The kit is made up of a
set of life jackets (worn by each agent), three-meter water measuring
sticks (indicating the potential level of ocean rise by 2017) and a
small journal. The documentation on view was taken at an Agents of
Change action in Basel, Switzerland on the Rheine river. Each Agent of
Change stood along the riverbank close to the boarding zone for a
ferry. When a person approached an agent and inquired about the
project, the agent would engage the person in a discussion about rising
ocean levels. The agent would then invite the person to cross the river
in the ferry and to continue the discussion. The journal was used to
record key issues that came up during conversation. The entry was then
given to the inquirer to read to allow the information to re-enter his
or her consciousness.
James Reed and the SSRU collaboratively developed the Agents of Change
project in Oxford, England as a creative initiative of Earth Agenda
Projects. The SSRU is involved with developing new methods of
engagement, modes of thought, participatory practices, direct
democracy, connective aesthetics and many other practices to work
towards an ecologically sustainable future.
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The Society for a Subliminal State: Carrie Dashow/Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg
Bios
The Society for a Subliminal State is an organization developed by Carrie Dashow and Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg. The Society for a Subliminal State agitates against the exclusive use of empirical evidence in the search for truth. It is an organization that believes there many different types of digging that may be productively undertaken.
The Society for a Subliminal State mirrors the form of a traditional historical society, contributing to the public discourse through a newsletter, a variety of public projects, a membership program, and this website. The Society believes that if you see it three times then it too may be the path to truth.
Carrie Dashow is a New York based artist working in the intersection of video, performance and new media. Through combining reading space, interaction, and energy with an anthropological, formalist, and geomantic slant, she finds deep and malleable content. Her work often exists in social and collective situations where it alternates between the possibilities of communication and the energetic points of interaction. Treating the subjective as a way to find truth, she has begun to work with ideas of fact and history in relation to our understanding of space. Much of her work takes place with groups of people, either people on the street, communities, relationships and even classes. Using available public tools – a greeting, an island, building, friend, forest, map, history, camera – the undercurrents of visible space are examined. With idea and energy as the axis point, she utilizes multi-disciplinary forms of self-expression from theater, subversion, painting, songwriting, electronics and video to create tactile, experiential and more real than real performances and videos. The work she instigates plays with and questions our psychological understanding of reality, replacing what we see inside out.
Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg is a sound artist, composer, and shape note singer whose work explores the intersections of technology and tradition. His work delves into personal narrative and the rootedness of history in geology and place. His output encompasses installation, music for live performance, tunebooks, web design, audio tours, and transmission arts.
Project Description
The Subliminal History of New York State is a multi-media project about living land and history that begins with Under Island and the story of Roosevelt Island. Using historical information and constructed narratives, Dashow and Karlsberg crafted a story to uncover the island as a living, breathing “monster” that desires to leave Manhattan's East River. Through the narrative, the artists reveal the monster’s journey up the Hudson, and into the Erie Canal, following the Empire State's (and thus the United States') route of progress. For two months, the artists traveled “with” the monster to towns throughout New York State including Troy, Schenectady, Rome, and Lily Dale. They worked with historians, geologists, archivists, and local land workers to gather information on each town’s history.
Under Island taps into the island as a living land, letting it perform and communicate with the people who venture to explore it. The story of Under Island is told through original shape note song poems, written by Dashow and Karlsberg. Since the late 1700s, shape note tunesmiths have written songs while traveling from town to town, teaching the music along the way. Beginning in New England in the 1770s, the singing tradition these itinerant singing masters promoted traveled west and south, settling in Georgia and Alabama. By the mid-19th century, the tradition of shape note singing was almost lost. The songs these tunesmiths wrote, often named for the locations where they were written, are a subliminal record of their lives and their senses of individuality, community, history, and geography.
Under Island is the story of a living land with its own agency that speaks through us and the built structures atop it. The artists use the real history and constructed story of Roosevelt Island as pointers to understand what the land might be saying. Under Island thus taps into the island as a living land, letting it perform and communicate with the people who venture to explore it.
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Anne-Katrin Spiess
Bio
Anne Katrin Spiess has defined her work as “Conceptual Land Art”. Interested in the relationship between physical and psychological spaces, Spiess creates site-specific projects in wide-open and extremely remote landscapes (Nebraska, Death Valley, Newfoundland, etc.). These projects, which Spiess documents through large-scale photography, video, and text, exist for a limited period of time. Once they have reached the end of their lifespan, the artist responsibly returns the landscape and borrowed materials to their natural cycles.
Project Description
Journey to Green Horizons was conceived for an environmental art exhibition titled Green Horizons at Bates College in Maine. The New York-based artist, inspired by the idea of carbon-neutral travel, researched various means of transportation to determine the least environmentally harmful method. Not surprisingly, walking and bicycling emerged as the most carbon-neutral means of transportation. The artist opted to make the journey from New York City to Lewiston, Maine by bicycle. Nine days after her departure, Spiess arrived at Bates College where she installed her project. The installation included the actual bicycle; the trailer containing a tent, sleeping bag, emergency gear, and other items; the video of the journey, and a chart revealing the amount of CO2 emitted by the various modes of transportation that the artist had researched.
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Chris Sollars
Bio
Chris Sollars is a multi-media artist living and working in San Francisco. His disciplined studio practices are committed to investigating the social and political concerns of the twenty-first century. Sollars’ work is deeply tied to current events and the reclamation of public space through urban intervention. These results are documented through drawings, sculpture, and videos that are subsequently incorporated into multimedia installations.
Sollars holds a BFA in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA from Bard. He is currently the director and curator of 667Shotwell, a non-commercial space based in his own home. 667Shotwell emerged in 2001 during the wake of disappearing art-spaces, as a place for artists to experiment. Sollar’s own work can be found in the collections of the B |
