Art Exhibition Proposal: Seeing Green

I want to create an exhibition that focuses on environmental art. I not only want to focus on artworks that critique the way we treat the earth, but artworks that show the beauty of the environment and why we should protect it. It is important to teach the public about the environment and its issues as it could have negative impacts on our future. Environmental issues have been very urgent with an increase of economic development. Economic development is frequently linked to mass pollution, consumption of natural resources, ecological disturbance, and climate changes resulting in human health issues and diminishing natural environment systems.¹ Displaying environmental art would welcome curiosity and demonstrate ideas in new and surprising ways. Having an exhibition on environmental art will encourage imagination with hands-on interaction, promoting participation and education as well as contemplation on environmental behaviors. It will also allow people to form an appreciation for the environment. These factors, as a consequence, will connect people with what they cherish in their environment and motivate them to take action.² Each artist I have selected to be featured in this exhibition focuses on different aspects of the environment in their art to inform people on the variety of issues that are currently taking place.

The Artists

Robert Adams

Seeing Green will include works by Robert Adams because his works have to do with the human manifestation of the land over the course of the twentieth century. I opted for a couple of his refined black-and-white photographs including Burning Oil Sludge, Boulder County, Colorado and Clearcut, Humbug Mountain, Clatsop County, Oregon to demonstrate the negative impacts of human activity on what is left of wilderness and open space like pollution and deforestation.

Robert Adams, Burning Oil Sludge, Boulder County, Colorado, 1974, gelatin silver print

View more of Adams's work at:

https://art21.org/artist/robert-adams/ 

http://www.artnet.com/artists/robert-adams/

Olafur Eliasson

Eliasson's works will fit very well into this exhibition as they deal with natural elements to alter the viewer's sensory perceptions and evoke an awareness of the sublime world around us and how we interact with it. His works that I have chosen are environmentally centered on factors of climate change. Algae Window focuses on a single-celled algae that removes large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and Your Waste of Time is about glacial melting.

Olafur Eliasson, Algae Window, 2020, glass spheres mounted on wall

Algae Window, close up view

View more of Eliasson's work at:
https://art21.org/artist/olafur-eliasson/
https://olafureliasson.net/

Diana Thater

This exhibition will include works by Thater as her video installations focus on threats to the natural world, such as the extinction of species to long-lasting environmental disasters. Her works Delphine and Chernobyl will be featured in Seeing Green. The former work focuses on how we belong to complex ecosystems, which our actions can impact. She uses video installations to immerse viewers in an underwater world with footage of wild dolphins in their natural habitats, creating a new way to communicate between species. The latter work focuses on the impacts of pollution and how nature persists no matter what.

Delphine 

Diana Thater, Delphine, 1999, projected video installation

View more of Thater's work at:
https://art21.org/artist/diana-thater/
http://thaterstudio.com/

Selected Artworks from the Artists

Clearcut, Humbug Mountain, Clatsop County, Oregon

Adams's Clearcut is featured in his 2005 book of photography, Turning Back: A Photographic Journal of Re-Exploration. The photographs focus on deforestation in the Northwest. Photos like this argue that continued cutting, especially with the use of artificial herbicides and fertilizers, will contribute to global warming and the unnatural erosion of soils. It is also a terrible example of the exhaustion of resources to leave new generations with. His evidence of logged-over areas and bulldozed landscapes through photographs show the sacrifices made for consumer culture of housing developments, shopping centers, etc.³

Robert Adams, Clearcut, Humbug Mountain, Clatsop County, Oregon, Turning Back series, 1999-2003, gelatin silver print 

Your Waste of Time

This is an immersive installation by Eliasson that displays huge fragments of ice that came off of Iceland's largest glacier, Vatnajökull. The ice is kept intact by keeping the gallery space at a temperature below freezing. The glacier's oldest ice comes from around AD 1200. People can walk around the chunks of ice and contemplate this example of a tangible history that represents an extended length of time. This is a process work of art in which the act of interacting at the art itself hinders the values Eliasson wants to examine.⁴ Visitors are allowed to touch the ice, which causes it to melt and takes time away from it. In this sense, it literally becomes a 'waste of time.'  Human touch shortens its lifespan to a nanosecond of a glacier's life. It shows the impact that humans can have on something that is supposed to last a long time, and it highlights the fast emergence of global warming. 

Entrance to Your Waste of Time

Olafur Eliasson, Your Waste of Time, 2006, installation with glacial ice

Close up view of glacial ice from Eliasson's Your Waste of Time

Chernobyl

Thater's installation is a 360° panorama of projections that reveals the impacts of nuclear pollution with images of Ukrainian village, Chernobyl. It was destroyed twenty five years ago with the explosion of Pripyat, a nuclear plant, which led to deaths and illnesses of thousands of its former inhabitants. It also left 100 times more nuclear debris than Hiroshima did. Chernobyl also shows the persistence of nature as the now deserted city has slowly been taken over by nature and animals that had previously come close to extinction. For example, the installation features herds of wild horses, or the rare Przewalski's horse, which reappeared in the village.⁵ It shows that even with human failures, nature will live on.  

Diana Thater, Chernobyl, 2011, projected video installation

Different point of view of Chernobyl, 2011

Artist Statements

Adams: "I'd like to document what's glorious in the West and remains glorious, despite what we've done to it. I'd like to be very truthful about that. But I also want to show what is disturbing and what needs correction. The best way to do that-and it's the way every artist dreams of-is to show it at the same time in the very same rectangle."

Eliasson: "The great strength of not just art, but culture is the ability to be inclusive and essentially reflect people's emotional need...It's not about me growing up in nature, it's really about you and what you can make of it. It's great to be in a situation where you feel that on a deep level the surroundings reflect your emotional need, so then you say, 'I am needed.'"

Thater: "I don't want people to lose themselves in a story...I want you to be conscious of your body. I would like for humans to recognize that they belong to a complicated and complex ecosystem that includes all kinds of other beings. Just because we can't communicate verbally doesn't mean we can't communicate in other ways. And so I want to form a possible model for communication through this kind of sympathetic bodily adventure. It's really important to me to be able to do something to, sort of, better the conditions of the animals, but also to better the conditions of humanity."

Notes

     ¹ Elen Akopova, Nursapa Assiya, and Ilyas Kuderin, "Current Environmental Problems in Member States of the Eurasian Economic Union" International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics 18, no. 4 (2018), 531.
     ² M. Marks, L. Chandler, and C. Baldwin, "Re-imagining the Environment: Using an Environmental Art Festival to Encourage Pro-environmental Behaviour and a Sense of Place" Local Environment 21, no. 3 (2016), 311.
     ³ Eric J. Sandeen, "Robert Adams and Colorado’s Cultural Landscapes: Picturing Tradition and Development in the New West" Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 16, no. 1 (2009), 97.
     ⁴ Charles Molesworth, "Olafur Eliasson and the Charge of Time" Salmagundi, no. 160/161 (2008), 43.
     ⁵ Maria Walsh, "Diana Thater" Art Monthly, no. 344 (2011), 30.

Bibliography

Akopova, Elen, Assiya Nursapa, and Ilyas Kuderin. "Current Environmental Problems in Member States of the Eurasian Economic Union." International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics 18, no. 4 (2018): 529-39.

Marks, M., L. Chandler, and C. Baldwin. "Re-imagining the Environment: Using an Environmental Art Festival to Encourage Pro-environmental Behaviour and a Sense of Place." Local Environment 21, no. 3 (2016): 310-29.

Molesworth, Charles. "Olafur Eliasson and the Charge of Time." Salmagundi, no. 160/161 (2008): 42-52,255.

Sandeen, Eric J. "Robert Adams and Colorado’s Cultural Landscapes: Picturing Tradition and Development in the New West." Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 16, no. 1 (2009): 97-116.

Walsh, Maria. "Diana Thater." Art Monthly, no. 344 (2011): 30.