Fragile Horizons: art focused on the climate crisis.
Fragile Horizons is a collection of works by artists focused on bringing the climate crisis to the forefront as a visual narrative on a crucial topic. According to Earth.org, the last decade was the hottest in 125 years, and we can now attribute the numerous natural disasters plaguing our Earth to human-driven climate change with certainty. It's a grim reality that many do not want to face. However, art can visually present this circumstance in a hopefully more palatable manner to an audience with the power to make a difference.
The good news is that the problem is (mostly) reversible if we act now. The United Nations has reported that the Earth's ozone layer is expected to recover within the next forty years due to ozone-depleting chemicals being banned and phased out of usage. Furthermore, we continue to be educated and informed about the impact of our decisions.
The featured artworks serve as a poignant reflection of our Earth's fragility, the beauty emanating from the fissures, and the intricate web of consequences and connectedness revealed in the textured reality. We hope this exhibit can inspire you to pause and reflect on the steps you can take to shift the crisis. Margaret Mead reminds us to "never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Rebecca Lee Kunz explores these questions in her recent exhibition Ever Green. Rebecca is a multi-media artist and the owner of Tree of Life Studio based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She earned a BFA in painting from the College of Santa Fe in 1998. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, her work draws upon tribal iconography and is greatly inspired by mythic and archetypical symbolism. While building awareness about environmental issues, she hopes to support climate justice efforts and inspire generative solutions to these problems.
I grew up in the West, so I’m inclined towards roaming. Now, in Brooklyn, I still hightail it to the mountains whenever I can, but mostly, I roam in the studio, still exploring but with an even more urgent focus. With two children and a lifetime of concern for the fate of the planet, critical issues about our near future keep me up at night. Cole and Bierstadt’s Grand Landscapes guide me and set the perfection bar high--achieving sublimity in their work through a transcendent human touch. And they never lie, chronicling not only nature’s magnificence but also the fallout of industrialization and exploitative governmental policies. In my work, I’ve been inventing alternative habitats within imagined landscapes as a response to my own deep concerns about the host of environmental changes we’re facing right now as the climate warms and inevitable social unrest ensues. I want to see what sense I can make of the landscape around me after the next Hurricane Sandy or the refugee crisis, but now within a tragic rhetoric of shape and color—“in this, I will find beauty…”
Ever Green :: An Inquiry
is an artist of border erasure, elevating the intersectionality of place, person, and politics to create a common human vernacular.
Time-based actions and social gestures are her syntax. Land, history, gender, climate, and culture are her subjects. Performance, video, photography, painting, and sculpture become her dynamic tools of grammar. Through enacted narratives, she reveals all that too often gets lost in translation, becoming the literal embodiment of the stories that divide but also bind us as human beings sharing a planet of great fragility and beauty.
curated by Tamara White, Ph.D.
The ocean is often referred to as a body of water. On the Horizon is a way to experience it as an actual body standing on a shoreline and not just a fact or number. As an artist who works with borders and borderlands, one of the most catastrophic borders is the line between land and water, river, sea – one that is silently and dangerously shifting. The ocean levels are predicted to rise 6 feet in the coming 30-50 years – largely as a result of our human footprint. “On the Horizon'' is a temporary installation consisting of six-foot-high, ten-inch-wide acrylic cylinders filled with seawater. And the global extinction of disappearing rivers is moving at an alarming rate. The aqueous sculptural terrain elicits a visceral experience, reflecting scientist's predictions that as global temperatures increase, sea levels will rise by 6.6 feet within the next 30-50 years, while rivers flows will run dry over the next 20 years.
People can see the ocean in a personified form, someone aging with us. Enabling us to feel the impact of our actions on her. Every time OTH is installed we gather community members to bring life to the piece. I organize a bucket brigade because each seabody requires 25 gallons of seawater. These pillars become alive once filled OTH welcomes communities to experience the sea as a vulnerable being, and will help connect individuals to the impending physical reality of what a more than 6 foot sea level rise will mean. This is my love letter to the sea and all forms of bodies of water that stem from it.
According to Cherokee mythology, Wren is the messenger. Through song, she calls out the news of the day. Wren poses questions, inquiries, and warns of what is to come...
When the native species of our earth have fallen, will we remember each of their names, as we once did? Okeechobee Gourd, Wild Red Trillium, the Prairie White Fringed Orchid.
Will we know how we once woke early to harvest the blossoms that only open in the morning? We dried herbs over sun-warmed stones near the river. How we brought them to the hearth to brew into medicine? How we gave thanks?
And when we arrive at a time when they have long since gone, will we still live in relation?
In our time, when an escalating number of people in the world are forced to flee their homes due to climate change, violence, or oppressive political systems, Anita Groener presents a profound meditation on war, loss, displacement, exile, resilience, renewal, and hope using drawing, sculpture, installation, and animation. Her installations painstakingly transform discarded materials such as twigs, twine, and cardboard into delicate sculptural metaphors for the interconnectedness of individual experiences, histories, and world events. Her work evokes patterns of displacement and the fragility of existence, as well as probing both the psychological effects of human tragedy and the resilience that may result.
Fast fashion and its impact on the climate
Every year, the average US consumer disposes approximately 81.5 pounds of clothing, leading to an estimated 11.3 million tons of textile
waste in America. These statistics do not include the donations shuffled from one country to the next. In America alone, 85% of textiles
end up in landfills, and 10% of the microplastics that end up in the ocean each year come from textiles.
Many artists use their platform to provide perspective on this ever-growing and concerning circumstance. Journalist Nikita Shukla explains, “Not only does this fast fashion pollution lead to high environmental negative impacts from the chemicals, but it also creates an unsafe environment and increases the risk of health issues for factory workers, cotton farmers, and even the consumers.”
Our goal is to bring awareness around choices and highlight artists presenting a provocative visual narrative. The next time you purchase something, stop and consider where it originated, where it is going, and whether or not it’s an impulse buy.
is an artist focused on amplifying positive impact,
and helping to make that impact unforgettable.
Fast Fashion becomes art.
