Reflections on the work of contemporary artists
With her public sculptures, Jean Shin makes powerful statements about the climate crisis out of discarded and obsolete materials. She often engages communities in her materials sourcing, mixing social practice into her public sculpture practice to create platforms for discussion. Ingenious and esthetically considered, her works show novel ways to engage with the climate crisis.
Continue reading “Jean Shin the Alchemist: Turning Waste into Art”
A founder of Rhizome, Mark Tribe is known for his early contributions to the field of new media art and his socially-engaged performances and installations. His current practice engages the power of aesthetic experience to illuminate the challenges we and future generations will face in the climate crisis. Since 2012, he has made landscape pictures that unpack American ideas about nature and land, from Manifest Destiny to contemporary environmentalism. In this interview, Mark talks about his views on the climate, his landscapes, and his integration of machine learning tools (AI) into his latest project Learning to Love the Future.
Continue reading “Mark Tribe: Learning to Love the Future”
©ECO Solidarity 2023 designers team. Courtesy of Dalia Stoniene and WantedDesign
Izabela Gola is an artist, curator of visual arts and design, and climate activist through her cultural programs. She was born in Poland and her background is visual arts, art history, and interior design. She came to the US to study art, and graduated with an MFA Degree from Hunter College in New York. She joined the Polish Cultural Institute New York in 2016 and has collaborated with Wanted Design since 2017. Her own art practice is multidisciplinary and she says this approach is important also in her curatorial capacity. She investigates structures of memory and identity as mediated through porcelain sculpture, video, and installation art. She also co-hosts a podcast called I Art New York on Radio Free Brooklyn.
Continue reading “Interview with Izabela Gola on ECO Solidarity”
Eva Davidova makes new media works that focus on ecological disaster, our interdependence as a species, and the political implications of technology which she unpacks with performative works rooted in the absurd. She imagines the paradox that one day our descendants–human or cyborg–will be constructing our reality as a simulation, and asks: “If we are the games our children will program one day, can we influence the code they are writing?”
Continue reading “Eva Davidova: Re-coding Our Paradox”
A central theme in my Crazy River project has been highlighting the emotional toll of the climate crisis by putting under a microscope, so to speak, my own feelings about not only the impacts of the crisis but the knowledge that humans’ actions are the cause. This series of three on-line essays, thought experiments if you like, expands that project to change the POV to non-human actors that are inextricably bound with the habitat in the Western Catskills: the black-legged or deer tick (Ixodes scapularis), the white-tail deer (Odocoileus virginianus), and Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica). All three have seen their habitat change dramatically through climate change and human interventions. Using my imagination and research, I try to enter the umwelt of all three species, an impossible task, as Thomas Nagel pointed out in “What Is It LIke to Be a Bat,” for which artistic license may give us the best chance to accomplish. My intentions in doing so fall along three axes: theoretical, aesthetic, and spiritual, dimensions all essential to my own art practice. Part III looks at the umwelt–a term normally applied only to animals whose use in this instance I will explain later–of Japanese knotweed from the perspective of the Vajrayana, or Tantric Buddhism.
Continue reading “Crazy River: Umwelt Series Part III”
A central theme in my Crazy River project has been highlighting the emotional toll of the climate crisis by putting under a microscope, so to speak, my own feelings about not only the impacts of the crisis but the knowledge that humans’ actions are the cause. This series of three on-line essays, thought experiments if you like, expands that project to change the POV to non-human actors that are inextricably bound with the habitat in the Western Catskills: the black-legged or deer tick (Ixodes scapularis), the white-tail deer (Odocoileus virginianus), and Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica). All three have seen their habitat change dramatically through climate change and human interventions. Using my imagination and research, I try to enter the umwelt of all three species, an impossible task, as Thomas Nagel pointed out in “What Is It LIke to Be a Bat,” for which artistic license may give us the best chance to accomplish. My intentions in doing so fall along three axes: theoretical, aesthetic, and spiritual, dimensions all essential to my own art practice. What follows is a look at the umwelt of white-tailed deer from the perspective of aesthetics.
Continue reading “Crazy River Umwelt Series: Part II”
A central theme in my Crazy River project has been highlighting the emotional toll of the climate crisis by putting under a microscope, so to speak, my own feelings about not only the impacts of the crisis but the knowledge that humans’ actions are the cause. This series of three on-line essays, thought experiments if you like, expands that project to change the POV to non-human actors that are inextricably bound with the habitat in the Western Catskills: the black-legged or deer tick (Ixodes scapularis), the white-tail deer (Odocoileus virginianus), and Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica). All three have seen their habitat change dramatically through climate change and human interventions. Using my imagination and research, I try to enter the umwelt of all three species, an impossible task, as Thomas Nagel pointed out in “What Is It LIke to Be a Bat,” for which artistic license may give us the best chance to accomplish. My intentions in doing so fall along three axes: theoretical, aesthetic, and spiritual, dimensions all essential to my own art practice. What follows is a look at the umwelt of black-legged ticks from the perspective of theory.
Continue reading “Crazy River Umwelt Series Part I”