ALL POWER ON EARTH COMES FROM THE SUN

D. Allen

South Minneapolis Parachute, 2023

Locally-foraged natural dye on secondhand handknit wool yarn

Made from 2020-2023, this is the fourth in a series of large-scale hand-knit textiles designed for installation and performance. It must be lifted/activated by community presence and engagement, rather than by the individual artist. This represents a turn in Allen's creative practice in the last decade that has been mostly solitary by necessity, due to increasingly limited mobility. This piece emerged during COVID-19 lockdowns after a gift of a few skeins of undyed handspun yarn and a neighborly invitation to harvest goldenrod together, at a time when project materials were difficult to come by. After MPD murdered George Floyd 12 blocks from the artist's apartment, the artist felt the need to take a turn toward joyful respite from oppressive state violence that reflected their experience of community support through mutual aid practices and deep connection to collective power.

Raphael Arar

Dual Power, 2024

Acrylic, Electronics, Software

Dual Power is an interactive installation that explores the tension between competing ideologies and power structures. Inspired by the political concept of dual power, originally articulated during the Russian Revolution, it refers to the coexistence of two separate powers vying for legitimacy. This piece extends the metaphor by navigating the push-pull dynamics between decentralization and centralization, the people and the state, autonomy, and control.

Participants engage with the piece through a web interface, choosing between ideologically opposed concepts. Each choice serves as a microcosm of larger societal currents. These choices illuminate two bulbs in the gallery—the brightness of each bulb varying in real-time, reflecting the collective inclinations of the participants.

Dual Power draws on the concept of binary oppositions in political theory, where opposing forces simultaneously support and contradict each other, a theme prevalent in the works of Marxist theoreticians and scholars—dialectical materialism. This installation probes these dualities and challenges the neoliberal ideas of individualism by highlighting the power of collective decision-making in a digitally mediated environment.

Lacy Barry

The Exploration of Inhabiting a Living Home, 2022

Custom stereoscope reel displaying a model

Model: model-making materials, trash, recycled cardboard, various papers, LED lights, battery or solar panel

The walls are dead. If we look at our architecture from the perspective of preservation, we understand our cities to be places of prolonged pre-decomposition of materials. Materials are taken from living matter and maintained in a sort of ‘purgatory’ state from decomposition. How we build structures largely contributes to our current global climate and social crises. Inhabiting living and self-sustaining dwellings are also possible. Working with nature as a collaborative partner can provide symbiotic benefits beyond shelter, it can be a source of food, water, and wellbeing. This is not fiction, but a real potentiality. One example is the living root bridges of Cherrapunji, where the living roots of rubber trees create bridge systems that have survived for millennia—lovingly maintaining themselves even after the original humans are gone.

With this ‘Living Home’ the artist is personally discovering and exploring aspects of a natural living home—not just as a dwelling—but a source of food and plant cultivation, water and resource recycling, a place of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, a community with other humans, animals, and nature.

Alex Baxter

Arbiter/Orbiter (II), 2023

Earthenware, white spray paint, mirror tiles

eds. Kit Braybrooke, Julia Kloiber, and Michelle Thorne

Illustrator, Leofrine Nøv

Gentle Dismantlings: A new wave of posthuman feminisms, 2023

Zine

Gentle Dismantlings was a very special collaborative issue of DING x Branch magazines which invited the next generation of posthuman feminists to share insights and possible futures ~ those which challenge the structural forces that prevent us from meeting each other, and the six million species we live alongside, in care and celebration.

Featuring works by: Gayatri Ganesh, Iryna Zamuruieva, Thiane de Nazaré Monteiro Neves Barroa, Kate Hennessy & Trudi Lynn Smith, Padmini Ray Murray, Georgina Voss & Eva Verhoeven, and Marjahn Finlayson.

Copy-editor: Laura Guzman

Available at: Branch Magazine, DING Magazine

With thanks to: Superrr Lab, Green Web Foundation, Studio We&Us

Megan Bickel

Hazy Cartoon Successes and Rock Demolition Derby . . . is expected for June 2456 in the Bernal Sphere. We will host a business of the future– to be dangerous, and it is among the merits of science that the equips the future for its duties, 2024

Micaceous Iron Oxide and Acrylic Paint on Inkjet print on canvas

This work explores ideas around the iconography of safety as a visual metaphor for systemic control and (mis)management. In collapse and compartmentalization, we see safety cones, plastic netting, and fencing amongst rocks. Utopic agrarian landscapes expand and contract. The wilderness merges and breaks with holographic textiles reflecting in the light. The images use the wilderness–or the imitation of–alongside visions of safety to question illusions of control and its relationship to state control.

Anna Campomanes

In the Darkness, 2024

Mixed-fiber, quilted felt, thread, beads, sequins

"An immense weight / of responsibility,/ to luminate and hold, / What seems eternal, / is in fact explosive change."

Erin Charpentier and Travis Neel

Future Nature, 2023

Digital collage on vinyl

In 2022 a developer proposed to transform five acres of paved parking lots into self-storage in the Heart of Lubbock (HOL) neighborhood. In collaboration with HOL neighbors, the artists organized a public campaign against the development. Through facilitation and dialogue with the developer, the neighborhood was gifted .66 acres of parking lot for community development.

Future Nature proposes to transition the gifted parking lot into a biodiverse habitat designed for climate resilience in anticipation of a warming climate. The work asks: Can the much-maligned Mesquite provide the conditions for livability in a rapidly shifting world of human-caused global warming and environmental destruction? The Future Nature project would reclaim a parking lot—turning it into a climate-resilient habitat that utilizes art, permaculture, predictive climate modeling, bioregionally specific plants, and rainwater harvesting green infrastructure.

Erin Charpentier and Travis Neel

The Mesquite Mile, 2021

Video documentation of socially engaged art and urban ecology

1 minute 37 seconds

Mesquite Mile is a multifaceted socially engaged art project situated in the city of Lubbock, TX, and the surrounding region, which is the unceded and traditional territory of the Comanche and Mescalero Apache peoples. The project relocates Mesquite trees and other drought-tolerant plants from agricultural land (where they are considered a nuisance) into the tree-poor urban core of Lubbock where they can contribute to solar cooling, stormwater runoff mitigation, and the creation of pedestrian-friendly green spaces. The project reframes the Mesquite tree (a victim of ecological forgetting) as a cultural asset, and in doing so, amplifies a sense of place and challenges the idea of the South Plains as a region of nothingness.

Since 2021, the project has transformed over an acre of urban streetscape, converting private, water-intensive lawns into green infrastructure-based mesquite prairie. Transforming underutilized front yards and neglected public spaces into distinctive public artworks that provide shade and celebrate regional culture, the work creates nature-focused open spaces that increase biodiversity.

Solarpunk Surf Club

Solarpunk Futures, 2020–2022

Mica-coated paper cards and gamebook, paper gameboard and tear-off pad, gamebox from salvaged cottonwood

Solarpunk Futures is an artist’s game for collaborative utopian visioning, working in (and against) the conventions of tabletop role-playing whereby players use backcasting and modified consensus to collectively ‘remember’ the stories of how their ancestors built a social ecological utopia.

Solarpunk Surf Club

SolidarityShieldᶜᶜ, 2023-24

Graphic film with sequins on salvaged wood

The SolidarityShieldᶜᶜ is a playful subversion of the lawn signs issued by home security corporations. Unlike the normative signs, which ominously warn potential “trespassers” (i.e. neighbors) of ubiquitous surveillance, the SolidarityShieldᶜᶜ reads, “THIS HOME PROTECTED BY COLLECTIVE CARE & MUTUAL DEFENSE 24 HOUR SOLIDARITY." Despite its flamboyant design, the SolidarityShieldᶜᶜ carries a tangible heft, suggesting the possibility of being wielded if necessary—a gesture of both symbolic and physical resistance to the panoptic apparatus.

MadRock Collaborative

Web of Survival, 2020-21

Wood, print, questions, play, participation

A collaborative game designed for outdoor spaces to encourage children of all ages to consider how a human-made town and a multi-species/element-made ecosystem interact. Look out for Web of Survival cookies & prompts scattered throughout the gallery!

Beehive Collective

The True Cost of Coal, 2010

Ink, graphite, and white-out mural scanned and printed on vinyl

In 2008, the Beehive allied with Appalachian grassroots organizers fighting mountaintop removal coal mining, a highly destructive practice that blasts ancient mountains into toxic moonscapes to fuel the ever-growing global demand for electricity. After more than two years of on-the-ground research, story-sharing, metaphor crafting, and meticulous drawing, including collaboration with hundreds of grassroots groups and folks from around the world, Beehive Collective released the True Cost of Coal graphics campaign in 2010.

This graphics campaign reflects the complexity of the struggles for land, livelihood, and self-determination playing out in Appalachia, and was made with the intention of honoring the tremendous history of organized resistance and the courage of communities living in the shadow of Big Coal.

The Appalachian mountains are where the most biodiverse temperate forests in the world are found, and this graphic is teeming with bio-regionally accurate plant and animal species that are both ecologically and culturally significant to Appalachia. A full cast of characters by their common names is available in the narrative. This visually stunning graphic serves as a multi-tool for activists and other folks seeking real solutions to energy extraction and climate change. We are all impacted by coal, and we all play a part in the system that demands coal as fuel.

Pale Blue Dot Collective (Louise Beer + John Hooper)

Last verse, 2022

Moving image with sound

10 minutes 28 seconds

It has taken our world ~13.7 billion years of the universe existing to develop into our home. All of these processes have helped the eucalyptus trees to grow into homes for insects, animals, and birds, have helped the pagodas to form, have helped our brains to develop in such a way that we can look out at the pinpricks of light in the sky and through research, understand that they are unfathomably old and unfathomably large spheres of gas. It took a vast period of time for our universe to form into the one we see around us.

Last verse is a dual-screen film made using footage and sound recorded in and around BigCi and up to Blackheath in the Blue Mountains of Australia. The film depicts two temporalities. Firstly from the perspective of a non-human animal and secondly, a cosmic time frame.

Everything Is Collective

Whatever the Terrain, Whoever the Observer, 2024

Video

44 minutes 26 seconds

The subject of this video is a little-known but highly significant Bureau of Land Management policy known as Visual Resource Management (VRM). The VRM system describes a "language for looking at landscapes” that is used  by the BLM to manage the landscape as an image. In the video, a series of non-human entities narrates the Visual Resource Management Handbook over a montage of weird encounters with land use, ecology, and extraction in the American West. The work highlights the ways images construct and reinforce colonial ideas about nature, and suggests that a different ecological aesthetic is possible.

Electronic Entomology

Extended Stay, 2014–

Solar cells, logic chips, piezo elements, transistors, passive components, motors, found materials, sunlight

Extended Stay consists of a number of selected solar electronic bugs gathering and reuniting across the gallery space to dwell and socialize with people, artworks, sunlight, and thoughts. These solar-powered electronic bugs are synthetic organisms that chirp and sing to the sun. Each bug possesses characteristics that change over time as the sunlight changes. Together they create a chorus particular to the space and time, creating a synthetic biophany.

Fresh Eye Arts

Eclipse, 2024

Acrylic paint on canvas

Adam Farcus

This Tree a Gift, 2022–

Graphite, charcoal, and walnut ink on paper, songs, conch shell, harmonica, adhesive

The project frames nature in an empathetic way, creating or revealing symbiotic connections between humans and nature. The drawings of the trees are made from direct observation in Illinois and Florida. The splattered walnut ink is made from black walnuts collected at Funks Grove in Illinois. Each drawing has a unique parenthetical title that names the tree represented.

Each drawing is also a score for one or two performers. The object-instruments are meant to imply that the score can be performed.

Food Fellowship

Growing Community, Ongoing

Burlap sack, photos, natural materials, paper

Abby Friend

Earth Democracy Banners, 2021

Found materials, natural dyes

Earth Democracy Banners visualize the work of Vandana Shiva focused on justice, peace, and sustainability. It is a series of ten banners that were first created for the Terrain Biennial, an international public art fair, in 2021 and displayed at Sonna Mae Heritage Farm in Finneytown, Ohio. Each banner is stitched together with salvaged materials and dyed with natural dyes.

Haley Friesen

Soft Spots, 2024

35mm purple lomography film

This series is the visual representation of the fear that can define our relationship with grief and the resistance we often feel at allowing ourselves to experience the full spectrum of negative emotions. Grief was once described to me as a river of water. Sometimes you're drowning in it, sometimes you're on the shoreline and sometimes you can't even see it - but if you listen, you can hear it.

Ellis Gene

Tellurian Insider, 2023

Ink, black tea

The Sun, in Reza Negarestani's theory-fiction work "Cyclonopedia," is described as an obliterating force. In his mythos, the Sun is a totalizing, even totalitarian force which binds the Earth to it. The Earth is not without its own power and agency, however. In this artwork, The Sun is depicted with branching lines which grasp out into the corners of the frame, and encover a being of undulating liquid forms. This being is representative of Negastrani's depiction of the sentience of Oil. Oil is, for Negastrani, a narrative lubricant of the world; understanding the sentience of Oil and its character makes communicable the strange contradictions of modernity; global warming, wars, and politics, are all suspiciously oily.

Oil is the malicious insider, whose influence on the Earth leads to desertification, rendering the Earth a plane of refraction of the Sun.

Negotiating with elements in our world as subjects rather than objects, as Negastrani does by inserting sentience into the sun or in oil, is a tendency among philosophic re-imaginings of ecology. Reframing our world with subjectivity within ecologic forces may prove to shift us away from an anthropocentric tendency which has evoked the current ecologic crisis.

Fuko Ito

Muscle Memory, 2024

Colored pencil drawing scanned and printed on canvas

Leaky Bodies, 2024

Colored pencil drawing scanned and printed on canvas

In her book, “The Cultural Politics of Emotion,” Sara Ahmed makes notes of how Western imperialists equate the process of seizing land to conquering feminized bodies. While colonized countries and their people are targeted to fulfill the desire of invasion from their oppressors, they remain leaky around the contours of their borders and bodies, protecting each other as they become one large body of solidarity. As we collectively bear witness to the brutal occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people, Ito is committed to portraying glimpses into our reality where moral clarity and courage are exemplified by those in our social web of family, friends, and strangers close to and beyond our geographical borders.

In opposition to Western thought and drawing traditions that insist on the separation of the mind and body in addition to its obsession with anatomical “accuracy” rooted in eugenics, Ito reimagines and illustrates human autonomy and anatomy from an anti-imperialist lens.

Dustin Jacobus

Transition of The City, 2022

Archival inkjet print

This watercolor and ink illustration shows a social ecological transition of a town: The Fall - Post industrial era - Urban Renaissance - Emergence of the Urban Reef - The contour city - Biocement era - Living city.

Adriene Jenik

ECOtarot deck + climate futures performance, Deck completed in 2017, performance ongoing

Screen print on handmade paper, natural pigments

The cards of the ECOtarot deck update standard archetypes and interpretations from the original “tarocchi” to reflect contemporary actors, values, and symbols from our climate drama. The ECOtarot deck’s beauty and power are derived from original artwork printed on handmade, plant-based paper (agave and recycled cotton and linen), and hand-painted with natural pigments.

The deck is meant to be activated through readings. The technology of the ECOtarot cards and these custom spreads catalyze a series of intimate speculative exchanges that tap into the rational and irrational thoughts and feelings of a wide range of people struggling to make sense of how to live in our world. Climate Future readings tap into strong, often contradictory emotions, including ecological grief and the optimism underlying natural cycles.

India Johnson

Solar Device, 2024

Anthotype on found sheet, clothespins, photocopied zines

A clothesline is the most basic, low-tech solar device. The ephemera displayed is documentation of a sun-printing party hosted in April 2024 by the artist. The event was held on National Clothesline Day to celebrate solar-powered laundry and the informal, semi-public social space of the clothesline.

At sunrise, a quilt was hung on the clothesline behind the artist's apartment, prepared for an anthotype process (photographic printing with natural dyes). The quilt was printed out until sunset when the photographic image was fixed and the quilt was removed from the line. Throughout the afternoon, neighbors and friends came to enjoy the piece and make their own sun-printed textiles. At the event, the artist also distributed a zine about the benefits of line-dried laundry.

Commando Jugendstil

The Floating Village, 2021

Archival inkjet print

In The Floating Village, artist collective Commando Jugenstil re-imagined an abandoned oil rig as a self-sustained village, able to generate energy with wind and tide turbines. It works as a food production facility as well, connected with the land with a system of sailing boats that can be rented and exchanged with other villages.

The old non-place gains new meaning as a community-driven landmark, moving from an extraction-based economy model to a circular, sustainable one.

Commando Jugendstil

Solarpunk Monthly Panels: What is a Federated Grid?, 2023

Archival inkjet print

The solarpunk society has learned its lesson from the mistakes of capitalism (week-long blackouts, no service for months in some cases) and completely redesigned its approach to energy provisioning. Under the now-federated grid, every neighborhood, village, or cluster of houses has its own grid, where everyone is both a producer and a consumer, and these networks are connected within a region, and then again within a bioregion, and so on.

Neighboring networks take over until repairs are completed, and it takes a lot less than it used to. Most people have at least some training in the maintenance of solar implants or domestic wind turbines, and special Energy Sovereignty Groups are at hand to tackle more complex cases.

Commando Jugendstil

Solarpunk Monthly Panels: Sustainable Transport in a Solarpunk City, 2023

Archival inkjet print

In the solarpunk city, private cars have become an exception rather than the rule, and their numbers no longer justify the spaces they had taken. The citizens transform parking lots, junctions, and roads into spaces for nature and community. In Milan, the people re-open the Navigli and the other canals which had made the city prosper in the Middle Ages and which had been covered in the 50s and 60s to make space for cars.

Emys Orbicularis is a solar-powered water bus. She is named after one of the species of freshwater turtles that can be found in Italy, with which she shares a certain resemblance because of its shell, made of solar panels. Water buses like this ply the waters, bringing travelers, workers and students across the city. With a little bit of patience, one can get to Pavia, the Lakes and the Po, on a boat or along the long-distance cycle paths, fully equipped to welcome all travelers. People travel without haste, and without emissions.

Jonah King

Honey Fungus, 2024

Virtual Reality (VR) and Installation

Honey Fungus is a sci-fi Virtual Reality work and installation that invites the audience to expand their bodily experience of the greater ecosystem.

Partially derived from an AI-generated amalgamation of Smithsonian field research and amateur erotica, a queer sentient ecological being—manifested in the form of an omnipresent mycelial entity—leads the audience on a journey through episodes of entangled ecology, where they engage in different stages of the fungal reproduction cycle while uncovering the orgasmic potential of soil and weather systems.

The project opens new perspectives for understanding where one body ends and another begins. Through Virtual Reality worldbuilding, the audience embraces the possibility that we all have not only our one body but also, as scholar Daisy Hildyard suggests, a 'second body' through which we are all interconnected.

Michelle Lane

Sun’s Corona, 2022

Longleaf pine needles, beeswax, cotton, glass, ceramic

Amanda Lechner

Estival Solstice, 2024

Handmade walnut and oak gall inks on paper

An ink painting in response to the Summer Solstice, exhibition prompt, and in-situ inspiration at the Skowhegan School of Art. The work was made in response to the geologic, human, and environmental history of a selected solstice site and the Sun’s role in our existence.

Ziyao Lin

Love Letters Without the Recipient, 2023

Single-channel video with sound

14 minutes 18 seconds

This artwork consists of a typewriter installation accompanied by video. An AI-powered typewriter sits by the seashore, diligently composing lines of love letters. However, these water-written words vanish without a trace as time passes. From day to night, the letters remain unfinished and unsent. Perhaps many have swallowed their emotions, never daring to express them, holding countless words within, yet never daring to write the recipient's name, nor ever sending them out.

The ceaseless writing of the machine is, in a sense, a manifestation of human "ego." The disappearance of the words on paper carries a sense of Eastern Zen philosophy — Zen emphasizes the concept of "dependent origination and emptiness." People and things come together by "conditions," arise due to conditions, and cease when the conditions dissolve. The essence of human beings and phenomena is "impermanence," their fundamental nature is "emptiness."

The sea may dry up, the stones may rot, all things arise from nothingness and return to nothingness. Everything passes, mountains become water.

The artwork is rich in natural imagery. A tree embodies the cycles of winter and spring, enduring wind and rain. It blooms and bears fruit freely, sometimes spring, sometimes winter; sometimes with a fierce wind, sometimes with sudden rain. Wind, sea, mountains, water... as the philosopher wrote: "Wandering with the wind is a unique form of dwelling, a form of friendship with limitation. Living and wandering within limitations." But can our longing be dissolved through the wanderings of nature until there is no worry or joy, no love or hate? The answer is yet to be known.

Daisy Love

Ripple, 2024

Donated bicycle wheels, steel, macramé cord, light, poplar wood, and mixed media

Ripple is an interactive sculpture exploring how small forces expand out into a greater whole. Utilizing leverage to move a disproportionate amount of weight or a number of moving parts with a simple lever, we can experience the activation energy required to start a reaction and consider how it is taken for granted or overlooked in our day-to-day. Whether it be turning on a light switch, lifting a car door handle, or braking on a bicycle, these seemingly insignificant moments are evidence of how we activate the world around us.

By deliberately considering what we activate ourselves, we can approach these engagements with an ethic of care. Here, the macramé spokes serve as a robust but more precarious link within a larger chain of events that asks us to pause and consider what it means to more intentionally approach our use of leverage. In these relations, there will always be an element of uncertainty and uncontrollability—as the light casts out from Ripple onto the predictability of the world around it.

Anthony Mead

Growth and decay are simultaneous actions of a free market, 2020

Laser and hand cut abaca and U.S. currency handmade paper with shredded U.S. currency embedments.

Shanna Merola

Love Canal, 2021-2024

Film photo collage

Love Canal is an examination of the relationship between ecosystems, the human body, and extractive economies. Nestled just outside of Niagara Falls, the sleepy town of Love Canal, NY became headline news in 1979 when an entire working-class community learned they had been unknowingly poisoned by leaking dioxin containers buried just below the asphalt. A few decades earlier, in the 1950’s, an industrial company dumped thousands of gallons of chemicals underground and sold that parcel of land to the Niagara Falls school board for one dollar. Fifteen years later the mothers of Love Canal began reporting extremely high rates of birth defects, miscarriages, and childhood leukemia.

Today, soil remediators like lupine, mullein, and milkweed thrive despite elevated toxicity levels that remain ever-present within the landscape. Driveways to nowhere, broken streetlights, and decommissioned fire hydrants mark the empty streets adjacent to a fenced off piece of land where the 99th Street School used to sit. But, in and around the containment zone (which seems eerily quiet now as nature reclaims it), are the stories of mothers who fought for the right to a safe and healthy environment. The intersections of race, class, gender, and housing are inextricably linked to the struggle as well, which ultimately led to the inception of North America's first Superfund. Broader themes in the series also explore adaptation, toxicity, reproduction, mutation, and survival - with a focus on the interconnectedness of our fragile ecosystem and the human body.

Hannah Moles

You and Me, 2023

Intaglio ink on paper

Carles Llonch Molina

Viatge a Zanbiose, 2022

Moving image with sound

5 minutes 44 seconds

Short fiction film inspired by the tradition of classical ecological utopias. Shot between the French regions of the Ardennes and the Hauts-de-France, this piece aims to displace the perception of everyday life and proposes an alternative reading of the landscape through desire and science fiction. It does so through an (e)utopian look at the intersection between politics, technology and human communities.

Maria Molteni with Ash Capachione, Laura Campagna, and Vin Caponigro

Triskele & The Monster’s Tools: A Solstice Invocation of Medusa Consciousness + MEDUSA: Myth, Memory (Anti)Monument, 2023

Experimental short film and risograph printed publication

Film: “Triskele & The Monster’s Tools: A Solstice Invocation of Medusa Consciousness” features a collaborative ritual performed atop “Gateway to Infinity (An Anti-monument)”, a public artwork in the form of a triple spiral labyrinth that explores collective rebirth. Located on Massachusett and Pawtucket Land adjacent to so-called “Christopher Columbus Park”, this work calls upon the receptive properties of an Anti-monument, designed to pull energy inward, to alchemize petrified trauma, and to center moving, living bodies over towering stone figures.

Publication: “Medusa: Myth, Memory, (Anti)Monument” was born from a sacred collaboration between queer, non-binary Italian-American witches, artists, and astrologers. They came together to perform a public ritual, addressing technologies of memory—from stone monuments to family heirlooms and shapeshifting mythologies. In the shadows of a colonial legacy (and headless Columbus statue), they invoke Medusa Consciousness and alchemize inherited trauma. Beneath the healing rays of the Summer Solstice sun, and upon the cycling curls of a triple spiral labyrinth, they sought to restore connections of the mind and heart, body and land.

May Moreshet

Un-petrified, 2024

Water-based markers, water brush, technical pen

This is a depiction of inspiration drawn from the recent total solar eclipse, and the understanding that as a society we are still able to connect with the natural world through such a shared experience, bringing a note of hope for our civilization's ability to take on the challenge of climate change more seriously. The future is indeterminate.

Beverly Naidus

The Dead Ocean Scrolls and Other Possible Futures, 2021

Mixed media

The Dead Ocean Scrolls and Other Possible Futures is a series that speaks to the precarity of this moment on our planet and imagines strategies for responding to many of the challenges we currently face.

The large hanging “scrolls” are made from a handsewn patchwork of scrap plastic, tracing paper, thread, digital prints, and paint. Previously these scrolls were exhibited as “trauma curtains” in the installation “We Almost Didn’t Make It,” exhibited in Seattle and England in 2018.

During the Pandemic time, Naidus spent time reflecting on the impossibility of healing those traumas and was reminded that thinking things were impossible to solve was part of the problem. She took inspiration from lots of speculative fiction, the Emergent Strategy Institute, and recent findings by radical anthropologists and archaeologists, and began reimagining antidotes to the current dystopia. This practice required writing, meditation, working in the dirt of her garden, lots of discussions, and processing complex layers of emotions via painting, dancing, and sewing.

The use of plastic as a material is laden with significance for her. Her late father was a chemical engineer who designed and manufactured plastics. He was also a lifelong gardener who sprayed the fruit trees with pesticides. As a result of her early exposure to these toxins, as well as the aerial spraying of Malathion in southern California during the nine years she lived in Los Angeles, she became disabled in her late 30s and early 40s by an environmental illness. Even though she identified as someone concerned about the environment before the illness, the experience of being profoundly touched by ecocide and meeting others who were similarly disabled changed her forever. She was one of the fortunate ones who recovered. Her healing process included a combination of modalities and protocols that shifted her body’s chemistry and immune system, and art making was crucial to that process. The project, CANARY NOTES: The Personal Politics of Environmental Illness that investigated the origins of pesticides and the corruption involved in marketing them, along with her Healing Deity series (inspired by her young son’s question: “Why are you always painting sick people?” helped her connect to her spiritual and creative strengths and catalyzed a profound shift that lifted her out of her disability.

Although she continues to navigate the modern world of industrial chemicals with caution, this somatic experience of ecocide deeply influenced her creative voice. The ability that her body has had to heal and transform, despite what could have been a permanent limitation, has informed her imagination in a powerful way. While she is not at all certain that the worst aspects of ecocide can be avoided, she has been looking at the neuroplasticity of the brain (another fascinating use of the word plastic) and attempting to reimagine our future with a trust that often seems irrational. Since that which cannot be explained logically has informed aspects of her art for most of her life, she will continue to believe that solutions to our current problems may exist in realms currently unknown. She has tried to depict some of these questions and reflections in The Dead Ocean Scrolls and Other Possible Futures.

As Naidus was reworking the curtains into scrolls, she found that the motif of the web spoke most vividly of the necessity to see our current problems as interconnected. A new series of digitally painted, Pandemic Healing Deities peek out of the plastic folds, bulges, and blisters, like change agents emerging to shift the energy and create transformation.

Sarah Nance

Marseille Tidal Gauge Aria, 2019-2021

Sonified tidal data, performed operatically

Marseille Tidal Gauge Aria is a vocal piece composed from tide level data collected over the past 130 years from a tidal gauge in the bay of Marseille, France. The artist converted each yearly average tide level into an individual note within their vocal range and set the resulting atonal composition to a poem from Rasu-Yong Tugen’s book, Songs from the Black Moon. Nance performs the piece operatically; the rising sea levels in the bay can be heard in the increasingly higher pitches of the aria.

In the poem's text, forest dwellers are trapped in an eternal night and light the trees on fire so they can see. Ravens in the forest fly away from the blaze and block light from the stars, sending the world into an even more eternal night.

Sara Olshansky

Dusk, Beneath Trees, 2024

Urethane with soft pastel and charcoal on panel

Olshansky is interested in creating visual alternatives to linear Time primarily through multilayered landscape painting. Land holds a record or memory, it can be excavated, predicted; it is layered, and constantly shifting—ideal for studying Time. The artist’s paintings draw upon a set of images they’ve taken as a gardener, archival images found online or passed to them—especially of Kentucky, and Impressionist landscape painting. Olshansky starts with a traditional, fully-rendered landscape then procedurally fractures it by adding and subtracting images of itself. This process preserves past versions to be later revealed alongside their altered counterparts. Some of the latest versions are removed with the veneer—an additive and subtractive maneuver. Instead of a representation of space, the picture plane frames Time’s passage as it “forgets” erased marks and “remembers” new ones. This particular painting uses urethane with a high resin content. Resin is plastic and urethane is often used for industrial coatings. One example of its industrial application is automotive paint jobs. This is the first urethane painting Olshansky has finished, and the artist is beginning to find an interesting and fraught tension between describing nature with such a plastic material.

Stephanie L. Paine

Helios, 2021-2022

Pinhole Camera Capture on Medium Format Color Film

The photographic series, Helios, is centralized on an exploration of the sun: the light to which everything is connected. The sun affects our planet’s climate, weather, and tides. It provides us with heat and life-giving light. With greater UV exposure and rising surface temperatures on Earth, the sun seems stronger than ever. These changes serve as a reminder of the interconnectedness between modern human life and the environment. In developing the series, the artist’s approach involved the pinhole camera. With its inherently long exposure times and pinpoint lens Paine developed a light writing technique of moving the camera in the direction of the sun. The resulting images balance abstraction with identifiable details like a neon line piercing the sky.

Nick Pedersen

Ultima, 2015

Digital photomontage

Ultima is a body of work deeply rooted in environmentalism, showing concern for the future by depicting the ways in which capitalism, extractivism, and carbon-form decimate the planet. The work foregrounds the potentialities for conflict and harmony between the human world and the non-human natural world. In the narrative progression shown in the book, these forces are alternately separate, joined, clashing, and reharmonizing in theatrical, post-apocalyptic ecologies—remnants belonging to the conceivably forgotten past.

CV Peterson

Mykitas Epoch: No Quick Fix, 2023

BioArt (dried mycelium) relief sculpture

Mykitas Epoch is part of the No Quick Fix series of bas-relief sculptures created out of Ecovative Design’s Mycofoam, a fungal alternative to Styrofoam. This series is inspired by research on Waxworms, Galleria mellonella, that have evolved to consume polyethylene, a type of plastic used to make plastic bags and bottles. In the excitement of wanting to breed this worm to be a solution to our plastic problem, it was nearly forgotten that waxworms’ favorite food is honeybee wax. Growing this worm’s population would be a detriment to the already dwindling honeybee community. A true catch-22.

Each wall sculpture is a variation on a theme, different by how the fungus grows and ages. The work is dried and does not deteriorate or continue to grow.

Everest Pipkin

Drift Mine Satellite, 2023

html & javascript, web game

Drift Mine Satellite is a maintenance text adventure about a person living underground in a limestone mine and their work maintaining the local communication network that has sprung up there.

Stemming from a (real!) visit to a decommissioned limestone mine that is now used to house RVs and boats over the winter (and a subsequent phone notification, under several hundred feet of rock, that the space station was visible overhead), Drift Mine Satellite imagines what a post-apocalyptic community life might look like among sleeping vacation vehicles. It is a utopian apocalypse fantasy, a forever-camping world narrowed to linear miles of RVs parked under a mountain, the people who live in them, and the systems that interconnect them, both social and material.

The game was commissioned for Solar Protocol, a network of solar-powered servers that connects from whatever server is in the most sunshine. It is programmed for the browser, with low-energy use and computational power front of mind. The entire story is told via spatialized text—no images, no libraries, just divs and textboxes and basic javascript.

Alyssum Pohl

Lemon Twist, 2024

Longleaf pine needles, beeswax, cotton, glass, antique porcelain plate

Coil basketry is an ancient, worldwide practice. This basket is made of pine needles from the longleaf pine tree, an endangered species. Longleaf pine trees were the predominant forest type in the southeastern United States before white settlement. Only 3% of these forests exist today, though conservation efforts are seeing success. North American tribes known to make longleaf pine needle baskets include but are not limited to: Cherokee, Choctaw, and Coushatta, Creek, Seminole. By practicing sustainable foraging and coil basketry, the artist continues a lineage that goes back for millennia, takes pride in this aspect of their humanity, feels connected to the land, and brings attention to the plight of the longleaf pine ecosystem. Using an antique plate as the base of the basket incorporates upcycling into this aesthetic and functional basket, and gives the basket a personal twist.

Dave Puchalsky

Sun Followers, 2024

Dye sublimation print on aluminum

Luke Rizzotto

Burn Ban, In Effect, 2024

Video, Sound, Light, CRT TV, Acrylic, Collected Rocks, Camping Chairs

Plexiglass cut in the shape of fire creates a Pepper’s Ghost effect through the reflection of the video. Viewers are invited to sit in the chairs to enjoy the company of others sitting around as well as to gaze into the fire.

Luke Rizzotto

Eternal Sunset – Forecast, 2024

CRT TV, VHS, VCR, Video, Sound

A simulated weather forecast in the style of the Weather Channel’s Weather Star 4000 forecasts.

Clint Sleeper

A Computer for Climate Crisis Coping, 2022

Wood, P5, OpenAI, Audio circuit

Using a revised artificial intelligence model trained with GPT3, this sculpture continually composes jokes about the climate crisis in the style of famous American comedians. Futile as it may be, the computer reminds us that technology and humor have always been tools for coping with our reality. The work pleads with the viewer to consider how we are implicated in various crises and the modes with which we assuage our anxieties on these pressing matters.

These investigations are inextricably linked to the philosophy of Simon Critchley, who convincingly reminds us that both philosophy and subsequently humor (a philosophical reflection) begin in disappointment. In a sense, all comedy is dark comedy, and philosophical reflection serves to cushion ever-present disappointment. We are compelled to answer back to our disappointing and infinitely demanding conditions. Here the artwork mimics our occasionally charming and often desperate attempt to appropriately respond to the news, at once searching for a way to soften the experience, so often through humor, in a continued effort to find some way to joke about the state of things.

With enough training and retraining of the model, the hope is that the work both learns and guides an algorithm through data sets seeking out a project that does not merely sift through these trends and ideologies, but appropriately reflects the cross-cultural affect defined by a world at the precipice of interplanetary crisis.

Club SOL

Taiao Tarot: an archetypal exploration of the more-than-human universe and our roles within it, 2024

Archival inkjet prints

In collaboration with a team of Guatemalan, Brazilian, Chilean, Congolese, Zambian, German, Irish & English artists, Club SOL developed a deck of tarot cards—called the Taiao Tarot (Maori for earth or environment)—designed to help groups explore the role(s) they have to play in deepening their own relationships with the natural world.

The 22 Major Arcana cards in the deck each depict a specific responsibility within the ecosocial movements and communities: for example, teacher, mediator, healer, storyteller or organizer. In contrast to the traditional tarot deck, the cards' imagery and language is BIPOC-centered and non-gendered. We may each embody a different role or roles at different stages of our lives; uncovering which roles we are currently inhabiting, and which we want to inhabit—or, importantly, may be avoiding—can help us move towards building more aligned, climate-resilient communities and understanding how we are meant to live together.

Club SOL seeks to host a series of tarot workshops helping attendees intuitively connect to their own roles and explore these in a group context. These workshops will explore how analogue, 'low' technologies such as tarot can offer solutions to the climate crisis that focus on interpersonal connection, and how these can be used to challenge existing social hierarchies and Western-centric perspectives on environmentalism by highlighting the work of indigenous, queer, and Black community organizers, worldviews, and heterarchies of knowledge.

Susan Solomon

Laundry, 2022

Gouache and Ink

Sunlight, the world's best dryer.

So Young Song

TS 95, 2023

3D object design

A face mask has been a daily necessity for Koreans living under heavy air pollution, even before the outbreak of COVID-19. After checking the air pollution forecast in the morning, people went out wearing masks hanging on the wall. However, people often forget that the face mask itself is composed of microplastics, which are fatal for our respiratory organs as much as micro-dust does.

In this conceptual art piece, Tillandsia and natural wood are substituted for a mask filter, made of chemical materials; the title implies that TS stands for Tillandsia and 95 represents how much pollution can be filtered. Tillandsia, an aerial plant surviving without roots, functions as a natural air purifier. Also, it lives in diverse environments from rainforests to deserts according to the species. This characteristic of Tillandsia will enable them to survive in extreme environments and temperatures in the future.

Anna Sorokina

Sun Oven, 2019

Collage, watercolor

The Sun is what powers the Earth, it is what gives us light, and therefore nourishment.

Eric Souther

Deep Time of Latent Space, 2024

Generated AI

10 minutes

Deep Time of Latent Space relates the strata of human activity within large language models as another layer of the Anthropocene, which places AI into the realm of geological thinking that spirals into deep time and broadcasts into the future. The AI narrator takes us through the most incomprehensible moments of our history starting with the Big Bang, the creation of Earth, and the start of life. It uses its generalized knowledge to resolve our grasp of these moments into data-visualized images. It does so with confidence and a little bit of attitude, however, it tends to hallucinate. These hallucinations shine a light on what is needed to create a more ethical and accurate AI.

The Jefferson Project at Lake George uses specific and local data to understand the impact of human activity on freshwater, and how to mitigate those effects. A short interview with Dr. Jeremy Farrell shares how the Jefferson Project uses machine learning to create predictive models for understanding the patterns of the past and reaching into the future to assist in preservation.

Lake George was also chosen as a site of deep time and for its art historical significance. At the birth of geology in the nineteenth century, the emerging science was in vogue. Many painters from the Hudson River School including John Frederick Kensett, Thomas Cole, and other painters painted portraits of rocks at the lake's shores. This point in time marks a transformative shift away from the biblical 6,000-year age of the earth to the conception of deep time that spans billions of years.

Krista Leigh Steinke

Sun Notations, 2018

Single channel video: 50 animated pinhole photographs

16 minutes 17 seconds

Sun Notations is an experimental video that animates over 50 still solargraphs—a work that merges an analog process (pinhole photography) with digital media. The original images capture the pathway of the sun rising and setting over time, with exposures that lasted one day up to an entire year. Here time and space expand, overlap, and then dissipate as clusters of dust appear like stars, the landscape morphs into abstraction, and sunlight traces across the screen like a drawing in motion. Throughout the work, references to creation and destruction call attention to our immediate present but also to the grim possibility that our planet may not have a forever.

KY Tenants

Rat Puppet, 2023

Paper mache, mixed media

In 2023, KY Tenants members came together to construct Rat Puppet, a paper mache landlord rat puppet that was used in Lexington, Kentucky’s Halloween Parade. Rat Puppet was accompanied by two banners: one asking “Is Your Landlord Being a Pest?” and another banner that read “Ban Source of Income Discrimination.” Street theater was a fun, humorous, and joyful way to bring attention to the serious and harmful source of income discrimination within housing, and was a great way to strengthen relationships in the organization through collective art builds.

Cassie Thornton

The Hologram, 2020–

Moving image with sound

4 minutes 24 seconds

An open-source, peer-to-peer, feminist, viral social technology for health care and dehabituating humans from capitalism.

The premise is simple: three people—a Triangle—meet on a regular basis, digitally or in person, to focus on the physical, mental, and social health of a fourth—the Hologram. The Hologram, in turn, teaches their caregivers how to give and also receive care; each member of their triangle becomes a hologram for another, different triangle, and so the system expands.

Rebecca West

Untitled Diptych with Red Reishi Mushroom Collaborator, 2024

Photopolymer gravure prints

Depicting documentation of an imagined extrastellar life form, the diptych was created as part of an exploration of alternate ecosystems and nonhuman life. The concepts draw on the artist’s learning journey about the complex and beautiful organisms of our world and seek to celebrate less charismatic, nonhuman organisms. The piece uses imaginative play to draw audiences into narratives about death, ecosystems, and life on our planet. Alongside the work are presented the red Reishi Mushrooms that served as a photographic set for these otherworldly images. West hopes that their unusual and beautiful appearance will spark interest in the many expressions of fungal life we cohabitate within this world, and spotlight the contribution of earth organisms to this speculative work.

Kiana White

Our bodies (apple detail), 2024

Ceramics

White investigates the feminine form, examining the figure from various perspectives. From introspection about the diverse perspectives of fellow women to the pervasive male gaze and societal constructs of desirability, the artist explores the spectrum of experiences that define womanhood. Through the lens of humor and the spirit of experimentation, White’s work examines the complexities of identity and the complicated interplay of recognition and objectification. Referencing White’s own experiences, the artist fosters an inclusive and unashamed dialogue for all individuals. In challenging and deconstructing the stereotypes, critiques, and judgments imposed upon the female body, the artist aims to carve out spaces of empowerment and understanding.

Elise Wojtowicz

Bog Pilgrim, 2022

Video, weavings, and fragile tissue paper mache casts of bog peat; cyanotypes toned with bog water and Irish moss tea; bog matter; yarn handspun of human hair

The nucleus of Bog Pilgrim is a performance, a sacrifice whose methodology is borrowed from the archaeological phenomenon of bog bodies, Iron Age people who were sacrificed into European peat bogs (swamp-like lands that are somewhere between water and ground), thousands of years in the past, their bodies uncovered in modern times with incredible preservation as a result of the bog’s unusual chemistry. It is theorized that many of these human sacrifices were a desperate appeal for help from pagan deities: then, as in now, the climate was undergoing a major shift, threatening life and land.

The pervasive truth of climate change colors every part of contemporary life; Wojtowicz joins this ancient line of desperate humans and makes a sacrifice of her own, leaving to rest in the Irish bogland a modern "bog body," a time traveler made of laser-etched leather and human hair yarn who functions as artifact, sacrifice, and descendant, to be uncovered in times unknown.

Jullian Young

hyperVENT, 2021

Digital video, data visualization, data sonification

6 minutes 5 seconds

hyperVENT is an experimental video art piece that examines the intimate connection between human breath and forest health. This video was created out of a reaction to the devastating wildfire season in the summer of 2020, a time when we were fractured from our communities due to a virus that also threatens our ability to breathe. Microscopic and macroscopic visuals of plant life and forests are strangled by an audio visualization of the artist's breath in a panicked state, while audio of sonified deforestation data plays alongside. The video concludes with the breath filter opening up to an exhale with the audio shifting to data tracking forest growth.