CURATOR’S STATEMENT

Experiments in the Field: Creative Collaboration in the Age of Ecological Concern presents artworks by Adriane Colburn, Alicia Escott, Stacey Goodman, Chanell Stone, Livien Yin, and Minoosh Zomorodinia, with a public participatory work by the Bureau of Linguistical Reality.

The ways we have come to know about our environment and the magnitude of the climate challenges we face has frequently been framed through visual modes such as satellite imagery, documentary photographs or simulation models. While scientific objectivity is crucial to our formal understanding of climate change, art offers a range of discursive, visual, and sensual strategies to connect with these complex issues. 

Art in its many forms has always documented human experience, imagined new futures, reoriented our perspectives, and sparked cultural change. The artists in this exhibition expand on the particularities of site, ownership, history, representation, perception, public domain, and stewardship. They explore deeply personal and cultural narratives through a transdisciplinary approach, working with performance, video, sculpture, writing, activism, scientific and historical data, and social engagement — a decisively human context that allows art to share meaning and transform values. While addressing ecological concerns, this exhibition is also a conceptual centrifuge for exploration and future action.

The undeniable intersections of environmentalism and socioeconomic justice are poetically woven into the work in this show. We invite viewers to seek these configurations as part of the viewing process. When we can practice radical self-inquiry, we honor our anxieties and aspirations, and nurture resilience. Developing literacy in community with others around climate and social issues protects us from becoming overwhelmed. When we can understand the challenges that impede our potential for collaboration, these things become not obstacles, but the means to connect and discover new solutions. 

This exhibition opens just over four months after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. Pollution and habitat loss lay the groundwork for pandemics; COVID-19 brings the environmental crisis to all of our doorsteps. Since March, our lives have been consumed with protecting our personal and communal health, to uncertain ends. Low-income neighborhoods and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities are experiencing an oversized impact, as is a historical pattern. The environmental movement requires an examination of our racist system, which thrives on the same mechanisms that have ravaged our planet. As we see with all resistance movements that have come before now, the political is personal, and action from this place is radically powerful.

Experiments in the Field seeks to bring artists together with the local community to lead and inspire critical discourse around civil and climate action. In light of COVID-19 shutdowns, it is likely that this exhibition and its affiliated programs will largely be experienced by screen. This is a real opportunity for all of us to reflect and feel into the devastating circumstance we are in. We may be inspired by art’s social and political potential, but how will we take care of ourselves and each other, and work boldly toward real systems change around environmental, racial, and socioeconomic justice?

— Svea Lin Soll

We respectfully acknowledge that the Berkeley Art Center is on the traditional native land of the Chochenyo Ohlone people, who have stewarded this land throughout the generations. Learn how you can acknowledge ancestral lands.

About the Artists

THE BUREAU OF LINGUISTICAL REALITY is a public participatory artwork by Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott focused on creating new language as a way to understand a new world — one altered by climate change and other human-centered events. BLR invited the other artists in the exhibition and additional members of the BAC community to coin a new word together at an evening-long Field Studies session in early February. The word and its definition will be displayed on signs in BAC’s back garden through the end of 2020.

ADRIANE COLBURN’s work investigates the complex relationships between human infrastructure, earth systems, technology, and the natural world. In this show, she uses data, images, and video gathered from her participation in scientific expeditions to investigate how fragile and inaccessible ecosystems are represented as maps. Colburn’s work suggests the devastating effects of the global circulation of materials and integrates grids, lines, and spindles to represent the systems that support material industries — from pipelines to ship tracks, roads, routes, and overlays.

Colburn’s work has been exhibited at Smack Mellon and Parsons/New School (New York), Luggage Store Gallery and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Artsterium (Republic of Georgia), and the Royal Academy of Art (London). She has been an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Kala Art Institute, and Blue Mountain Center. Colburn is currently on the faculty at Bard College in New York.

ALICIA ESCOTT’s sculptural explorations dialogue with both the man-made gallery and the surrounding ecology — as it is and as it was. Her work in this show incorporates her most recent research on fire resilience and carbon sequestration in the California landscape, and explores how non-human life inhabits physical space as well as our psyches. Escott interweaves natural materials with the found detritus of contemporary human life, from iPhone chargers to copper telephone wires, and critiques the ways humans conflate flora and fauna with new, technological functions in their own lives.

In 2019, Escott was artist-in-residence at Recology San Francisco and the Growlery, and she has previously been a fellow at Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, JB Blunk Artist Residency, and Irving Street Projects. She is a founding member of 100 Days Action, which was a recipient of the 2017 YBCA 100 Award, and half of the social practice project the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, whose work has been featured in The Economist, New Yorker, and KQED.

STACEY GOODMAN’s interest in drone technology is haunted by the privilege and the power it implies. Like map-makers in the age of European exploration or observers in what Michel Foucault calls the panopticon, we’ve become aware that the ability to see the big picture entails a sense of total control, both real and imagined. In this exhibit, Goodman explores how experiencing nature gives us a way to assuage the panic we feel when facing our new ecological reality. Subjective experience shows the beauty and mystery that data-driven infographics do not provide. Goodman’s multimedia work explores and critiques interlinked ideologies of mastery over nature.

Oscillating between the purely abstract and the figurative, Goodman’s work seeks to unsettle and quietly disrupt, allowing him to get lost in subjects that fascinate him — from astrological imagery to Depression Era photography. Goodman sees himself somewhere between shaman and perennial apprentice in his need to both evoke mystery and insight, as well as nurture the desire for discovery, renewal, and beginning again.

CHANELL STONE’s practice is invested in challenging insular views of Blackness by expanding on narratives subject to Black erasure. Fueled by the conflicting lineage surrounding the African-American legacy and nature, Stone is inspired to create work that highlights a long-standing connection to the land. She analyzes the Black body’s presence within urban “forests” to reclaim and reconnect to nature itself, even within the confines of the man-made environment. Through a compilation of environmental portraits and black-and-white analogue photography, Stone explores the notion of “holding space” within one’s environment and the nuances of compartmentalized nature.

Stone’s work has been shown at the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco), Aperture Gallery (New York), and SF Camerawork (San Francisco), among others. Awards include Emerging Artist Award, Museum of the African Diaspora; Purchase Prize Award, Center for Photography at Woodstock; and an artist residency at Real Space and Time. She is a finalist for the 2020 San Francisco Artadia Award.

LIVIEN YIN works with sculpture and photo-based assemblage, using materials to reference the migration of laborers who produced them — from Chinese silk–cotton from the Americas, to European wool and poppy seeds, the raw material for opium. She examines artifacts that unsettle the distribution of power among humans and the natural resources we strive to control. Victorian objects, Wardian cases, scientific terms such as Batesian mimicry, and organisms ranging from coral snakes to bark beetles to dry rot fungus inform her work. Within these narratives, she confronts the imperial legacies transmitted alongside goods such as tea, silk, porcelain, and opium.

Yin received her MFA in Art Practice at Stanford University and BA in Studio Art at Reed College. She is currently a 2019–2020 Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts.

MINOOSH ZOMORODINIA’s work investigates how the self relates to the environment and visualizes that struggle. Recently, she has been creating sculptures based on concepts of nomadism and colonialism by mapping her walking routes and transforming them into three-dimensional objects. Zomorodinia, an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist, makes visible the emotional and psychological reflections of her mind's eye when it’s inspired by her environments. In this show, a video projection piece imagines the future of urban gardens, devoid of water, bringing a critical issue to an absurd conclusion. What will happen to spaces of respite without sufficient natural resources?

Zomorodinia has exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission, and SOMArts Cultural Center (San Francisco); Pori Art Museum (Finland); Nevada Museum of Art (Reno); and Pro Arts (Oakland). She has received numerous awards and residencies, including the Kala Art Institute Media Fellowship Award, Headlands Center for the Arts, Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists' Residency, I-Park Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program.

About the Curator

SVEA LIN SOLL is a consultant and curator residing in Berkeley. She has spent 20 years as an art world polymath in both nonprofit and commercial institutions, curating and marketing exhibitions and programs, and working with artists, architects, clients, and the general public to observe art practices, present artwork, build collections, and provoke new ways of thinking about the world and our place in it. Soll’s curatorial projects have included artist-in-residency programs, window projects, and experimental film programs. Experiments in the Field is inspired by her research into strategies to combat hopelessness in the face of climate crisis.

“I have always sought out threads of culture as sources of comfort, connection, inspiration, and hope during hard times,” Soll says. “In thinking about climate change — not only as a concerned human, but as a mother — I experienced intense powerlessness. I read a book called Environmental Melancholia by Renee Lertzman that broadly explained our various emotional responses to climate issues. I decided to channel these feelings into educating myself on American environmental history and culture.

“I began exploring environmental issues through the lens of artists, beginning with the Land Art movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s up until now (currently more artists than ever are collaborating with scientists on solution-based works). There is a world of innovative and radical thinking and visual strategies on the myriad subjects around climate change, and it is still a very emerging field of thought. I reflected on my experience as a curator, where my circle of influence spanned, and the people I could reach, and decided to put this exhibition together.”