The Canary Project, founded in 2006 by the artists Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler/Morris) initially consisted of Sayler photographing landscapes throughout the world where scientists are studying the impacts of climate change. Titled A History of the Future, the sites included melting glaciers in Peru, rising waters in the Netherlands and Venice, and post-Katrina New Orleans. Exhibitions of the photographs quickly expanded into multimedia events that were accompanied with contextual research and archival images, and then with installations and sculptures by other artists, and extensive educational and outreach materials.

The Canary Project now includes diverse works involving more than 30 artists, designers, writers, educators and scientists.

The causes and effects of global change, which encompass those of climate change, are increasingly the focus of artists around the world, whether they are working in the Antarctic, Canada, Chile, or Southeast Asia. Many of those projects rely on photographic evidence for working materials. What makes the Canary Project unique is that Sayler and Morris have partnered with local artists and others wherever they have been in residence. This enables them to expand the reach of their concern through the use of other media, including bus ads, billboards, posters, and installations such as the climate poker game Quartet for the End of Time, and the fashion performance Increase your Albedo.

This archive exhibition will include photographs, manuscripts, and objects from 2005 through 2010. The archive is in the collection of Nevada Museum of Art, Center for Art + Environment, Gift of Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris.

Australian sculptor and photographer Andrew Rogers began making large-scale geoglyphs in 1999 to create meditative spaces on each continent of the globe. Geoglyphs are large-scale designs made on the ground by either removing materials such as surface soils, gravel, and small rocks, or by rearranging preexisting stones and natural materials. Ancient geoglyphs are found throughout the desert regions of the world, as well as the Amazon Basin, Europe, and the American West. Rogers completed his series of contemporary geoglyphs in 2010, after finishing forty-seven sculptures in thirteen countries with the help of nearly 7,000 people.

At each of his sites, Rogers incorporates at least two motifs. One of them is typically the Rhythm of Life figure—a personal symbol for Rogers that represents change and is based on his early abstract sculptures. Since construction of the geoglyphs often requires the help of hundreds of residents, the second motif is chosen by the local people with whom Rogers works. Local motifs range from totemic animals, sacred symbols, and historical emblems.

The use of two motifs at each site—one chosen by Rogers and one chosen by local residents—makes these geoglyphs both site-specific, global, and a unique contribution to the history of Land Art. The photographs in this exhibition were either made by Rogers from an aircraft or obtained from commercial satellite imagery.

The photographs in this exhibition are from the Center for Art + Environment Archive Collections.

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer who creates bridges between sound art and contemporary visual culture. Through music, photographs and film stills from his journey to the Antarctic, along with original artworks, and re-appropriated archival materials, Miller uses Antarctica as an entry point for contemplating humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Based on The Book of Ice—part fictional manifesto, part history, and part science book—this exhibition combines video footage of past performances with graphics and dynamic data visualizations related to climate change in the Earth’s polar regions.

DJ Spooky has collaborated with drummer Dave Lombardo of thrash metal band Slayer; singer, songwriter and guitarist Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth; Chuck D of Public Enemy fame; rapper Kool Keith; Towa Tei, formerly of Deee-Lite; Vernon Reid of Living Colour; The Coup; artists Yoko Ono and Shepard Fairey and many others. Miller is currently featured on Syfy Channel’s Let’s Imagine Greater web series, and has performed around the world from France to Japan to Mexico City. In 2010, DJ Spooky became one of the first DJ’s to create an iPhone app, called DJ Mixer.

While teaching art at the University of California, Santa Barbara during the 1980s, artist Ciel Bergman discovered increasing amounts of plastic trash washing up on the local beaches. She began to pick up the detritus with her friend Nancy Merrill. Together they created an installation titled Sea of Clouds What Can I Do that was exhibited in 1987 at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum.

During the artmaking process, and prompted by “witnessing the suffering of many beached, garroted and dying sea mammals, strangling in plastic” Bergman conceived the idea for recycling waste plastic to create a sustainable road paving material to reduce our dependence on oil. As a result, she helped launch the product known as Plasphalt™, which combines recycled plastic and asphalt. Plasphalt™ provides superior performance and reduced costs compared to traditional asphalt paving, but to date has yet to be adopted widely by roadbuilders.

Kim Abeles is a Los Angeles artist who explores and maps her urban environment to chronicle broad social issues. Trained originally as a painter in the 1970s, she began working on community based art projects in the 1980s. Abeles is widely regarded as an important figure in Southern California activist and feminist art, both movements that are closely connected to art and environment. Abeles uses a variety of media to bring attention to problems such as air pollution, waste generation, and the scarcity of fresh water. Instead of using traditional art materials such as paint and canvas, however, she draws with smog, quilts with trash, and uses common materials such as clothing, furniture, and household goods to connect people’s everyday lives with larger issues.

Abeles began to garner national attention with The Smog Collector, a project in which she used smog as a medium to create portraits of everything from politicians to food, making apparent the sources and effects of pollution. The project was covered by many media outlets, among them the CBS Evening News, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal. Her work has since toured internationally and been collected by major institutions throughout the country. Abeles was born in Missouri, received a B.F.A. degree in painting from Ohio University and then a M.F.A. degree in studio art from the University of California, Irvine in 1980. Kim Abeles continues to live and work in downtown Los Angeles.

The materials in this exhibition are drawn from the artist’s extensive donation to the Archive Collections of the Center for Art + Environment. Rich with sketches, manuscripts, correspondence, and notebooks from throughout her career, the archive provides a unique story of how an artist who was first trained to work in a studio developed into an avant-garde activist and leader in the eco-art movement.

Support

John Ben Snow Memorial Trust and Metabolic Studio

Maps are not pictures of the land, but rather abstractions we use to understand where we are and how to move across the landscape. Maps can be as complicated and difficult to read as an abstract painting, but because we are surrounded by maps–from printed road maps bought at gas stations to digital ones on our smartphones–we are adept at reading them. Our familiarity with them means that we also sometimes forget that they are amazing objects.

In her ongoing series of mapping projects, Erika Osborne positions people as they gaze at landscapes such as the Grand Canyon. Then she paints lines from maps representing those scenes, or the contours of the land itself, on their skin. When we view Osborne’s photographs, she asks us to think about the differences and similarities between looking at a place, reading a map, and looking at a picture of a place. Osborne also paints maps on people while they are standing in front of large wall-mounted maps that convey different types of information, such as climate change or the spread of destructive insects and fires. She makes clear the connection between people, landscapes, navigational maps, and those maps used to take action in the landscape.

Osborne earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of New Mexico, where she helped run the Land Arts of the American West program. She now teaches at West Virginia University in Morgantown, where she runs the Art and Environment and Place: Appalachia. By using the body as a canvas upon which to paint maps, Osborne helps us regain appreciation for how maps place us in the landscape. The result is a renewed appreciation for cartography, one of the oldest and most sophisticated graphic technologies invented by humans.

This archive exhibition includes research materials, maps, drawings, photographs, and objects from 2005 through 2010. The archive is in the collection of Nevada Museum of Art, Center for Art + Environment, Gift of Erika Osborne.

Support

John Ben Snow Memorial Trust and Metabolic Studio

See the massive and very rare The Book of the Lagoons by artists Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison on view in the CA+E Research Library, 11 a.m. – 2 p.m., Wednesday-Sunday.

Purchased with funds from the Elke Hoppe Youth Advancement Trust.

Minerals have been used as a source of pigment ever since humans began making rock art from ochre in Africa, Australia, and Europe more than 300,000 years ago. Ulrike Arnold, who lives in Germany and Arizona, began using earth minerals for her paintings in 1980.

In 2002 Arnold met the owners of the Southwest Meteorite Laboratory, a business in Arizona that supplies meteorite thin sections to NASA and other scientific organizations around the world for study purposes. The laboratory provided her with the dust generated from sectioning meteorites found in China, Namibia, Greenland, Argentina, Arizona, and New Mexico.

To paint with these earth minerals, Arnold grinds stones and rocks into a paste that she mixes on location with an acrylic binder. To work with the meteoritic materials, Arnold spreads her canvases on the ground, applies glue onto the surface then pours the fine particles of iron, nickel, and chondrules over the surface. Chondrules are primitive compounds that are the oldest solid material found in our solar system, and building blocks of the planets.

Arnold’s work incorporates terrestrial minerals from 200 million years ago, and meteoritic dust as old as 4.5 billion years. Her paintings embody the geology of the remote locations in which she works–from Chile’s Atacama Desert and remote Australia to Easter Island¬–as well as the formation of the planets. The paintings seek to evoke the emotional connection between Earth and Heavens, sky and ground, a connection that has been painted from prehistoric time until the present.

The Williston Basin is a 300,000-square-mile depression that includes parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Two miles beneath the surface of the basin lies a shale deposit called the Bakken Formation, where hydraulic fracturing has unlocked vast amounts of petroleum. Fracturing, also known as “fracking,” pumps water, sand, and chemicals underground at high pressure to crack buried strata and force oil and gas to wells. The process is controversial because the long-term effects of the process on groundwater, ground stability, and other environmental conditions are unknown.

Photographer Terry Evans and journalist/writer Elizabeth Farnsworth took cameras, geology books, laptops, and notebooks to North Dakota for 18 months to explore the effects of the oil boom on prairie and people. The project generated aerial and ground-based photographs, and extensive interviews with people on all sides of the boom. From those rejoicing in new wealth to those mourning the lost prairie, the work by Evans and Farnsworth reveals the complicated environmental, economic, and social consequences brought about by the boom.

Support

The John Ben Snow Memorial Trust

In 2012, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, two of the Internet’s most critically acclaimed bloggers, embarked on a multi-state tour of the United States “to document often overlooked yet fascinating sites through the eyes of the innovators, trendsetters, entrepreneurs, and designers at the forefront of ideas today.” Their 16 month long journey, inspired by nineteenth-century survey expeditions, was known as VENUE. Manaugh and Twilley took along a variety of analog and digital instruments and a custom, hand-built toolbox containing recording equipment that they used as a pop-up studio—a temporary “venue”—to record audio and video.

Manaugh and Twilley visited sites as diverse as New Mexico’s radio astronomy observatory known as the Very Large Array, to the world’s largest living organism in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, to the stilt houses of Florida’s Biscayne Bay. They interviewed experts ranging from a speleo-biologist, a golf-course designer, the keeper of the U.S. national atomic clock, and a car crash reconstructionist, to environmental lawyers, concept artists, archivists, and photographers. Throughout their travels they posted reports of their exploits, assembling a completely new cross-section of the country for the 21st century.

Sponsor

Western States Arts Federation