Installation view of Experiments in the Field: Creative Collaboration in the Age of Ecological Concern
Some call it the apocalypse. Others the awakening. We know in our bones and increasingly in the cognitive folds of our mammalian brains that we are living through an ennobling paradox, approaching a threshold of historical progress and steadying ourselves as we experience radical shifts in social, economic, and ecological systems that are rife with injustice and death.
Ambitions to transform California’s swampy Central Valley into an agricultural paradise and the estuary of San Francisco Bay into a cosmopolitan utopia of networked liberation technology are wilting in the deadly dry heat of a climate crisis. The landscape is burning, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) workers and families are disproportionately suffering, and digital technologies rooted in patriarchal structures threaten to distract, harass, and harvest data that targets individuals for surveillance. The artists of Experiments in the Field: Creative Collaboration in the Age of Ecological Concern at the Berkeley Art Center bear witness to this tragic and complex unfolding, and yet urge us to see the potential for regeneration of the soils, peoples, and technologies that populate this region. The meditative photographs, videos, sculptures, drawings, and linguistic provocations that comprise the exhibition, while sobering, ultimately seed hope for a world of resilience, healing, equity, inclusion, and justice.
Experiments in the Field curator Svea Lin Soll has brought together a diverse group of contemporary artists who move towards greater intersectionality as a necessary framework for understanding the interconnectedness of achieving both social and environmental justice. In this exhibition, they develop a multiperspectival and multispecies narrative of ecological concern that erupts with relevancy amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and extreme weather events.
Chanell Stone, Brooklyn Lush, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist
Chanell Stone’s Brooklyn Lush (2018) is an archival print photograph of the artist standing in a garden. She catches your eye as you enter the exhibition. Stone’s gaze is direct and her posture is confident, yet also relaxed. She looks to be wearing a white cotton shirt and skirt and white sneakers. Seedlings and saplings of canopy trees gather at her feet retaining a sense of privacy and intimacy as to the figure’s relationship to the ground. It is an urban garden with a cinder block wall to one side and a wood fence on the other. Over her right shoulder there is a heap of debris, concise in its placement though barely discernible in its component parts: a paint bucket, some metal pipe, and castaway cinder blocks. It is a shadowy space of decay that anchors the black and white image. Overhead, a nearby tree’s branches arc and bow downward offering a counter-aesthetic to the shadows. The grayscale of leaves undulates and overlaps in a spectrum of possibility as they rustle and catch the sun. The body language of the tree and the artist are in rhythm. Her hair and arms, like the branches, fall loosely towards the ground.
Stone describes her photographic practice as re-naturing the Black body to the American landscape. The shadows of African-American history are present, the alienating forces of capitalism and racism, but minimally so. Light transcends the darkness in her photography. Stone works at immersing and reconnecting Black bodies to nature, unveiling the dignity of an enduring connection to this land. Self-portraits in her grandmother’s garden are deeply personal and ancestral in their reach, as are the works of photocollage she creates using historic family photographs. Six additional photographs by Stone expand on this practice.
Stacey Goodman’s triptych of videos entitled This Tree (2020) continues the exhibition’s meditation on human bodies in landscapes, but with a dramatic shift in perspective. These videos deliver aerial views from a flying drone. From the sky, there is no receding point. Such an aerial perspective is useful to the military for surveillance purposes, as well as to science for gathering evidence to support mitigation and adaptation to the climate crisis. The abstraction of drone images may offer insights into the safety and health of a population or region, but if granted too much authority, they can lead to an illusion of control and misguided actions that violate the livelihoods of those on the ground. Goodman flies his drone to challenge these disciplined endeavors.
Stacey Goodman, This Tree — Devotion, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist
You can barely see the lines and contours of Goodman’s body in the video This Tree — Devotion. The drone records his movements from a great height. He is ant-like crawling across a grassy field to the base of a full-canopied tree. It is the raw and emotive exertion of Goodman’s voice, the audio that is paired with the video, that offers a counter-aesthetic to the aerial abstraction: “Walking through the mud, this is how we show devotion. We have lost touch with the earth...we are afraid of the plants and disease, the animals, the wildness of what we claim to want to protect,” he mutters as he moves belly-to-ground towards the tree’s cool embrace.
A closeup video image of the grass appears as Goodman approaches the tree. It is laid over the aerial view with translucency so that both are visible, elaborating the tension and his desire that humanity develop a haptic and devotional relationship to nature in tandem with the rational and scientific one. His efforts culminate with an immersive POV raising of the camera to revel in his arrival and in the possibility of restoring the relationship between plants and people. Two other videos, entitled This Tree — Mastery and This Tree — Communion, complete Goodman’s triptych.
Intermittent Measurements (2020–ongoing), a video by Adriane Colburn, complements Goodman’s work. She too engages the disciplinary methods of science, although she works more collaboratively than critically. The single channel video is currently a “work in progress” that follows scientists conducting fieldwork in the dense vegetation of a tropical forest on the side of a volcano in Costa Rica, meditating on the experiential and affective nature of their tedious and rational endeavor. Like Goodman, Colburn clearly values video as a medium of understanding landscapes in a more tactile way. We see sunlight, fog, and scientific tools; we hear the wind, birds, human voices, and the sound of CO2 seeping from the ground. Colburn’s ultimate aim is to marry empathetic footage with forms of scientific data ranging from satellite images to lidar and hyperspectral imaging. It will be an interdisciplinary effort to increase public knowledge of elevated CO2 levels in these forests, their ability to sequester it, and the labor of studying it.
The sculptural work in this exhibition is unified by its low-lying topography. Adriane Colburn’s The Spoils (2019) is a colorful matrix of ash wood, reclaimed wood, consumer culture bric-a-brac, granite, marble, silver, and brass that draws directly from the language of mapping to orient viewers. Objects, lines, and colors coalesce as a symbolic rumination on the extractive industries of global capitalism. Livien Yin’s Bombyx Papaver (2019) is more compact in its footprint and organic in its appearance. Ambrosia maple wood and peach blossom branches support a mass of silk, raw cotton, wool, and white poppy seeds billowing at the center of an otherwise intricate weaving. The work may appear organic, but it too references the nefarious cultures of extraction that drive the import and export of goods between China, the Americas, Europe, and India. Minoosh Zomorodinia’s Qanat (2020) is a metallic system of pools, ducts, and towers illuminated at the back of the gallery. “Qanat” is the Persian word for an ancient system of underground channels that distribute water from aquifers at the heads of valleys to supply villages and irrigate fields below. However, in place of water, Zomorodinia has created channels of light as an expression of water scarcity in the arid regions of Iran. Today drought and the equitable distribution of water are critical issues amplified by climate change. High intensity bulbs and a video projection of modern life in Tehran relay the cumulative effects of the extraction and exhaustion of resources by a country determined to keep pace with capitalism’s regime of growth. Each low-lying installation draws your attention downward to the floorboards beneath your feet, to the earth beneath the art.
Alicia Escott’s Coastal Live Oak (2019–2020) is a sprawling arrangement of video, sculpture, and drawing on the south wall of the gallery, and yet its components are so humble and delicate as to almost evade the human eye. Escott brings our attention to alternative scales of existence. She beckons us to explore the upturned worlds of plants and animals in the ecologies of late capitalism and its promised utopia of advanced technologies.
Alicia Escott, Coastal Live Oak, 2019–20
An iPod entangled and suspended from the dried branches of a live oak tree, one of the only California native oaks that thrives in the coastal environment, screens a video of Escott waving her hand behind the paw of an extinct California grizzly bear drawn on a piece of discarded plastic. This work grieves the long and awful histories of colonialism and capitalism. Hunted by gold miners and livestock farmers in the early days of settlement and later for sport as well as its warm fur, the last sighting of a California grizzly was in 1924 at Sequoia National Park. Escott sourced the imagery for this grizzly paw drawing and two others in this exhibition from the Internet.
Other relics woven into Escott’s live oak ecology include gold jewelry, copper telephone wires, PVC piping, fluorescent lighting, pieces of plastic, iPhone chargers, and earbuds. Grief is most certainly present in this careful arrangement, but you will also find seeds of regeneration. Drawings of live oak acorns are presented on equal footing as the grizzly paws. She honors the fire-evolved nuts and their critical role in climate resilience, forest ecology, and carbon sequestration.
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is an ongoing participatory artwork by Escott and Heidi Quante. For the final work of this exhibition, they engaged the other artists from the show along with members of the Berkeley Art Center community to collectively coin a new word related to climate crisis: “spectramergensee.” Through this participatory project, the public engages the power of language as a necessary tool for navigating this time of radical change. Language and the visual arts are regenerative technologies that describe the tragedies, complexities, and potentialities of this moment. If a world of resilience, healing, equity, inclusion, and justice is describable, it can be summoned into being. This process is slow and demands creative collaboration with one another and with nature. We cannot simply engineer our way forward. We must renounce the control and command paradigm of colonialism and capitalism to embrace a more humble and intimate partnership with the land.
Laura Eliasieh is a writer, historian, and curator specializing in contemporary art, women’s history, and the environmental movement. She earned a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University and an MA in Exhibition and Museum Studies from the San Francisco Art Institute.
All photos by Felix Quintana unless otherwise noted