- I’m running a Kickstarter Campaign through March 17 to finish My Electric Genealogy, a project I’ve poured my heart and soul into for over five years. Check it out and please consider supporting me!
- I am a 2019-2020 “outreach fellow” at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München. During my fellowship, I’m preparing for the premiere and tour of My Electric Genealogy, kicking off in April in Los Angeles
- Ecologies of Acknowledgement, a video and letterpress print project I developed with Nicholas Brown, is on exhibition at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell as part of the three-campus exhibition, Local Ecologies, through March 6, 2020
- I am a featured speaker at the Experimental Environments Mellon Symposium at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, March 5-6, 2020
- National TLC Service publications, banners and ephemera are on display as part of the reading room of Hot Spots: Radioactivity in the Landscape, at the Krannert Art Museum, through March 21
- Grassland continues to screen in festivals and microcinema venues across the United Stattes. Recent and upcoming screenings include the Black Maria Film Festival Tour, the Big Muddy Film Festival, the Echo Park Film Center (Los Angeles), the Emerald Earth Film Festival (Eugene), the NW Film Center (Portland), and the Nightingale Cinema (Chicago)
As a research-based artist, I use a range of media to give form to the political ecology of place. While my earlier work addressed spaces shaped by political struggle, the growing ecological crisis has prompted me to focus on the damaged landscapes of everyday life. The ‘slow violence’ of the climate crisis—with its linked emergencies of extinction, toxicity, land loss, and pollinator collapse–cannot be separated from continuing legacies of racism and colonialism. If climate change represents a change of geologic proportions, as many scientists believe, it requires we re-evaluate everything that came before: concepts of the autonomous individual, an economics based on perpetual growth, and values systems structured around (some) human needs. I strive to make work that is big enough to capture complexity and small enough for intimacy, identification, and action.
Art historian W.J.T. Mitchell influentially observed that “landscape” should be understood less as a noun than a verb—not merely a visual genre but a cultural practice through which the historical, material, and social processes that have shaped space are naturalized and rendered opaque. The visual dimension of landscape has been widely theorized as concealing more than revealing, presenting a methodological challenge for the visual artist. By themselves, images may monumentalize their subjects, and artists have long used strategies like distortion, sequencing, captioning, collage, and montage to disrupt the power of the single image. While concerns with landscape have animated my most significant work over the past seven years, I have consistently sought to shift, undermine, or supplement the visual dimension of space through textual and experiential means. Rather than offer fixed, masterful works that might present alternative content but address the audience or spectator in familiar ways, I seek to share my research process as one possible model for critical engagement with space. My goal is to offer accounts of landscape that allow them to be read as complex but contingent material, cultural, and interspecies assemblages.
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