Last week, I travelled to Harrisonburg, VA to attend the International Environmental Communication Association’s biennial Conference on Communication and the Environment (COCE 2023). I was humbled to share some new paintings and thoughts, and I was thrilled to present the panel discussion “Artists Dismantling the Anthropocentric Mindset,” featuring artists Austen Camille, Byron Wolfe, and Lydia Cheshewalla. (Camille, Wolfe, and Cheshewalla are all part of a larger, multi-venue exhibition that I’m curating in Philadelphia this fall titled Seeing the Anthropocene—stay tuned for more details!)
My own paintings and words were included in the group exhibition Shifting Climate: Artists Respond to the Earth in Crisis, organized by Yvonne Love. The show was physically installed at James Madison University (the site of the conference) and featured works by Rebecca Rutstein, Deirdre Murphy, Yvonne and David Love, and myself.
Throughout my time in Harrisonburg, I witnessed incredible conversations about climate change between artists, scientists, environmental activists, and communications experts, deepening my conviction in the power and utility of artists' insights at this extraordinary moment.
Below is a reproduction of my contribution to the show, including writing that I presented as wall text.
New Configuration I, 2023, oil on canvas, 50” x 40”
My paintings reflect on current American culture while imagining new, reconfigured worlds. The compositions are loosely based on small collages that I create from photos of the different places where I've lived.
New Configuration I and II contain a mixture of hope and foreboding. The paintings emphasize reinvention and project a sense of possibility, but they also depict human construction bluntly dominating the landscape, fracturing nature and trapping birds within isolated shards of sky. Like all of my paintings, New Configuration I and II reflect my grappling with conflicting emotions; they struggle to reconcile my hope for radical change with cynicism and feelings of attachment to familiar ways of being.
New Configuration II, 2023, oil on canvas, 50” x 40”
All of my paintings are disorienting to some degree. In earlier works, this disorientation served to reflect my own psychological experience living in this country. In recent pieces though, such as New Configuration I and II, I've been thinking of disorientation as generative. Losing one’s bearings may enable a person to re-orient herself in a fundamentally new way.
Reconstructing the Sky (left) and New Sun (right), 2023, oil on canvas, 16” x 16” each
While making New Sun and Reconstructing the Sky, I was thinking about Elizabeth Kolbert's Under a White Sky. In the book, Kolbert envisions a more sustainable future not as a romantic return to pre-industrial ways of being, but rather as a new integration of human technologies and natural systems. Kolbert suggests that, practically, we may need to intervene further into ecosystems and gene pools to mitigate the problems we've created.
BOGO, 2022, oil on canvas, 31” x 48”
BOGO interprets America as a fractured, unstable place forged by consumer culture and a modern, anthropocentric worldview. At the time that I made the painting, I was hopeful that the pandemic might create an opportunity to reshape the country in a more sustainable and equitable way.
All of my paintings in this exhibition meditate on change. COVID-19 has transformed our world over the past three years, and climate change promises to upend everything further, either by unleashing cascading catastrophes or by forcing humans to take radical preventative action. Change is inevitable; directing it is our only hope.