Climate for Change
An Exhibition at the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Pinkard Gallery
Climate for Change is the fourth in a series of evolving exhibits focused on the climate and environmental crisis by the seven artists of Atlantika Collective. Curated by Atlantika member María Alejandra Sáenz and exhibited at the Maryland Institute College of Art’s (MICA) Pinkard Gallery from January 19 to March 3, 2024, the exhibition illustrates the current environmental emergency. It acts as a beacon that brings light to the possibilities of transforming our relationship with the natural world.
The latest iteration of the exhibition features new work that responds to the most pressing environmental challenges occurring in the contemporary moment. It builds on prior Atlantika exhibits by highlighting the complexity of the threats we face and how these challenges interact with each other to complicate the path forward.
In doing so, Altlantika extends an invitation to relearn our ways of relating to nature. The artworks featured in the exhibition inspire and stimulate actions to help mitigate the critical consequences of climate change and be in communion with the environment. In the words of environmental scientist Suzanne Simard: “Making this transformation requires that humans reconnect with nature—the forests, the prairie, the oceans—instead of treating everything and everyone as objects for exploitation.” Despite the fact that easy solutions do not exist, the artists strongly advocate for immediate and decisive action to minimize the likelihood of catastrophe.
Curator Maria Sáenz chose to divide the exhibit into broad subject matter themes that immediately demonstrate the wide-ranging interests of the artists and the breadth of the challenges we face. Specific works related to these focal points, including sustainable development, waterways, and forests, were grouped in the gallery space.
THEME ONE: THE THREAT TO OUR WATERWAYS
Together, the artists weave a complex fabric of environmental impacts that must ultimately be understood together. To begin with, four artists focus specifically on the severe environmental degradation facing our waterways.
Atlantika Member Billy Friebele has been working for 3 to 4 years on projects related to the Anacostia River in Washington, DC, and suburban Maryland. The river is well known for containing dangerous toxins and severe pollution, but it is also now the site of some successful clean-up efforts. In his latest works, Friebele focuses on a printer that was thrown directly into the water, using it as a focal point for diverse outputs that explore the relationship between humans, technology, and the river. First, the exhibition features his underwater video of the Anacostia and its marine life, including fish, algae, and vines, interacting with the printer as a sort of micro-ecosystem. It also features complex, multi-layered images in which stills from the video were fed to an artificial intelligence (AI) and then placed over larger images in which the artist mimicked the AI image with paint and natural materials pulled from the river. Friebele also displays circuit boards salvaged from the water.
In Ex. Ex. Colonies, Todd Forsgren photographed coral specimens in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. The Smithsonian’s collection was founded at almost the same time as the advent of photography and also the first cyanotypes of algae created by Anna Atkins. He chose to print them in the signature deep blue of cyanotypes, a color that is, of course, intimately associated with water. The specimens were also collected at a time and in places (such as Bikini Atoll, the Panama and Suez Canal channels, Guano Islands) of colonial and scientific ambition for the United States. The word “colonies” has a double meaning related to the colonies of living coral themselves, but also to the colonial past that helped create the collection. The title also includes “Ex. Ex.” because these coral specimens suffered a sort of “double death” -- first in being ripped out of the ocean, and second as a result of serious ecological challenges, including acidification and rising temperatures. This strategy by Forsgren calls attention to the possible loss of species that rely on coral as their habitat. Approximately 25 percent of all marine species rely on coral reefs for their habitat, so the loss of coral reefs would be truly catastrophic for the world.
In 2018-2019, Mark Isaac & Gabriela Bulisova spent 10 months under the auspices of a Fulbright grant living in Southeastern Siberia near Lake Baikal, the world’s oldest, deepest, most voluminous, and most biologically diverse Lake. Their project, titled The Second Fire, calls attention to the growing environmental problems facing the Lake. Increased development and tourism along its shores have caused serious pollution in shallow areas, and rapidly rising temperatures threaten the entire ecosystem. To make matters worse, state officials are now using the excuse of Western sanctions in response to the tragic war in Ukraine to reduce or remove environmental protections. Bulisova and Isaac’s semi-abstract, experimental photographs, often embracing complex reflections, universalize the subject matter and remind us all that we have a stake in Baikal’s health. At the same time, they bring to the forefront the links between war and environmental devastation -- links that are increasingly prominent around the globe.
THEME TWO: RECYCLING AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
The works of Sue Wrbican and Yam Chew Oh not only question our lifestyle choices and dependence on consumer culture, but they reveal the damaging consequences of that culture both on land and in water. In making recycled and found material a key building block of their art, they inspire us to adopt a new and more ecologically aware posture in our own lives.
Yam Chew Oh’s process-driven painting, We’ll cross the bridge when we get there, references Robert Frost’s famous poem, “The Road Not Taken.” Reminiscent of a topographic map, it features a bold, red pathway across the picture frame that suddenly splits, suggesting alternative futures. To Oh, both the poem and the painting it inspired center on “the issues of choice and action, not dissimilar to those we encounter in fighting climate change.” Oh’s sculpture, A Convenient Matter, is a personal response to the excessive use of plastic water bottles during COVID-19 lockdown in Singapore, where he was born. His inkjet prints of water bottles glowing in his kitchen at night are printed on second-hand vellum, allowed to roll while they dry, and then secured with a single staple. The blue paper rolls might allude to water itself, to oceanic creatures, or to rolled incense paper offered to the dead in Singapore’s Taoist culture. They are contained by torn recycled Christmas tree netting that resembles a large water drop or teardrop, another reference to the losses we are experiencing in the natural world.
Sue Wrbican was heavily influenced by research demonstrating that the idea that most plastics are recyclable is a myth created by the oil industry to acclimate us to these highly damaging materials. In 2019, she started saving plastic and cardboard packaging in her studio, using them to create maquettes that form otherworldly seascapes, and photographing them digitally. This strategy also links her work to the artists focused more overtly on waterways. “In creating the sculptural forms, I envision them as surreal futures for objects that once had meaning, drifting away in unpredictable, mysterious currents,” Wrbican says. Her large-scale photo titled Before the Ghost was specifically inspired by Lars Von Trier’s film, Melancholia. Some of the images, such as those from the Mysterious Drift series, are more abstract. Others, from the A Ship Split series and the All Hands to the Crude Gathering series, are more representational. Wrbican imagines that the sculptural forms she brings to life in her studio are “reforming themselves into their own regatta, or a parade of ships with nowhere to go.”
THEME THREE: FORESTS AT RISK
A final section of the exhibition focuses on the world’s forests, which are facing serious threats from wildfires and other sources, but may also play a role in reducing the impact of climate change.
Katie Kehoe creates “survival architecture,” objects and wearables to use as props in performances and as elements in her site-specific installations. For the Pinkard Gallery exhibit, Kehoe included one of her recent creations, a large portable wildfire shelter, created during a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute. The viewer is immediately jarred by the realization that we may need this or some similar strategy for protection from increasingly frequent fire, heat, and smoke threats around us. Kehoe installed this and similar shelters in the landscape of the recent Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak wildfire, which was the most serious in New Mexico’s history. Photographic documentation of these installations was also included in the Climate for Change exhibit, along with identifying GPS coordinates that might allow viewers to find the locations on their own. “My objective is to engage the public to reflect on specific sites in relation to climate change and extreme weather events,” she explains. Kehoe’s compelling and disconcerting work forces us to personally confront our own fragility and uncertainty in the face of accelerating climate-related threats.
Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac also shared work that explores the multiple roles of trees in the climate crisis as part of their joint project A Tree for the Forest. Like Kehoe, Bulisova focuses on the increasing threat posed by wildfires. “The fire season is longer, more land is burned, and fires are more destructive than before,” she notes. “Each of these events releases more carbon dioxide, only worsening climate change.” Her practice involves exposing an entire roll of medium format film as a single landscape affected by wildfires. She then selectively burns the negatives to further accentuate the impact of fires and prints them as large-scale panoramas that demand our attention -- and our actions. Many of her images were captured at the sites of extremely serious fire events in Cyprus and the Czech Republic. Both countries recently experienced the worst wildfires in their history.
Isaac’s work focuses on a more hopeful aspect of the climate crisis -- the recent scientific discovery that trees communicate extensively underground through fungal networks. Isaac approaches this topic by making panoramic photos of the crowns of trees, using them as a stand-in for the roots that lie below. The panoramic camera makes many “mistakes” as it tries to knit together the branches, but these “accidents" help depict the lively communication that trees are engaging in without our knowledge. In Isaac’s images, the trees vibrate with energy. But this lively exuberance is tempered by the stark black and white silhouettes in these images, which hint at the danger trees face from wildfires, disease, and drought. This treatment allows the images to enter into a robust dialogue with Bulisova’s prints, supplying a more complex and complete vision of the role of trees in the world’s ecosystems today.
RELATED EVENTS
The collective sponsors multiple events in collaboration with scientists, artists, students, and activists who are working on issues related to the climate crisis, and the exhibition at Pinkard Gallery was no exception. On January 29, 2024, Atlantika members were invited by Howie Lee Weiss, Senior Thesis and Head Professor in the Fine Arts Department, to participate in MICA’s Monday Artist at Noon Speaker Series to present their work and engage in dialogue with students about climate change, environmental protection, and the power of working in a collective. The in-depth exchange that ensued strongly suggests that MICA students are engaged and energized on artmaking and more when it comes to the climate crisis.
Then, on February 20, 2024, Katie Kehoe and Billy Friebele moderated a successful dialogue with activists and artists/educators who work to cultivate sustainable futures and fight for environmental justice in Baltimore, Maryland. Activists from the York Road Partnership, including Karen DeCamp, Cindy Camp, Lisa Polyak, discussed their campaign against a human crematorium on local York Road and the impending threat of air pollution. Laure Drogoul, an artist/educator, shared techniques for teaching students how to use salvaged material as raw material in the creation of art. Barbara Johnson, Community Advocacy Senior Manager at Blue Water Baltimore, described approaches for making safe, clean water a reality in Baltimore. Hugh Pocock, an artist/educator, reported on his role in forming the Ecosystems, Sustainability, and Justice major at MICA. This event was the latest in a series of similar events that engage in dialogue across disciplines with the goal of forging motivated and cohesive coalitions in the fight against warming and pollution.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The following individuals were indispensable in ensuring the success of the exhibition. The entire Collective wishes to express our sincere thanks for their skill, commitment, and kindness:
Cindy Camp, Activists Fighting a Human Crematorium, The York Road Partnership
Karen DeCamp, Activists Fighting a Human Crematorium, The York Road Partnership
Andrea J. Dixon, Director, Office of Exhibitions, MICA
Laure Drogoul, Interdisciplinary Artist and Educator, MICA
Morgan Frailey, Gallery Installation Manager, Office of Exhibitions, MICA
Megan Irwin Professor in the Graphic Arts department at Washington University in St. Louis
Barbara Johnson, Community Advocacy Senior Manager, Blue Water Baltimore
Hugh Pocock, Artist, Educator, and Founding Coordinator of the Minor in Sustainability and Social Practice, and Major in Ecosystems, Sustainability and Justice, MICA
Lisa Polyak, Activists Fighting a Human Crematorium, The York Road Partnership
Howie Weiss, Senior Thesis and Head Professor, Fine Arts, MICA