This exhibition highlights four artists that address environmental concerns with a common thread throughout their work related to science, memory, and the lasting impact of human interactions affecting the future of our planet. Binh Danh's daguerreotypes—part nostalgic vision, part environmental cry—document the natural beauty of the currently protected land Yosemite National Park. Rena Detrixhe creates dirt rugs using Oklahoma soil, sifting the collective memories embedded in the dust. Ryan Hoover’s tree forms are created by an algorithm that the artist has written to simulate natural growth patterns. Marion Wilson’s photographs and drawings are often through the lens of ecology, where her attention has been drawn to the study of stress-tolerant and overlooked plant species that live in microenvironments—particularly, moss.
Co-curated by Amy Moorefield, Director, and Janie Kreines, Curator of Academic Affairs & Community Engagement at the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College.
Rena Detrixhe is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Salina, Kansas where she is working as a research resident with The Land Institute. Through objects and installations, ephemeral sculpture, performance, drawings, and process-based work, she explores systems of value and cultural relations to land and the more-than human world with attention to histories of injustice. Her current research is focused on Midwestern agriculture as both an important cultural signifier and a deeply troubled relationship to the land.
Photograph by Chris Anderson. Courtesy of the artist and Abigail Ogilvy Gallery.
This work embodies the complicated history of humans’ relationship to nature and focuses on the region from which the dirt was sourced, where human presence has deeply altered the landscape. The rug begins with earth. Red, loose soil from Oklahoma, where Detrixhe spent three years, is gathered and hand-sifted into a fine powder-like substance. Spiraling outward from the center of the plotted rug, the dirt is poured, smoothed, and imprinted with modified shoe-soles to create intricate patterns. The refining and sifting of the material and the imprinting of the pattern is a meditation on this past, a gesture of sensitivity, and the desire for understanding.
Rena Detrixhe. Red Dirt Rug (detail), 2017. Installed at Western Michigan University, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Oklahoma soil, impressed with shoe sole patterns, 25’ x 40’. Photo by Mark Andrus. Courtesy of the artist.
Interview with Rena Detrixhe:
1. What personal experiences informed your desire to create art related to the environment? I am the daughter of a soil conservation technician and a ceramicist. I grew up in the country in the (post rock region) of central Kansas. I had lived in three limestone houses by the age of six and spent most of my childhood on my family’s 10 acres in the country surrounded by farmland and a creek tributary to the Smoky Hill River. This place and all its varied complexities, from the native plants and grasses to the neighboring monocrops and their worn soil, the deep horizons dotted with oil wells to the powerful thunderstorms, the snakes skins found beneath stairs to the fossils in our limestone walls continue to influence my work and the way I understand material, time, and the more-than-human world.
I have continued to pay attention to the landscapes that surround me and am always searching for a deeper understanding of the social, cultural, and environmental histories of place—particularly with regards to human impact. Today, the personal experiences that inform my art-making are both my embodied interactions with landscapes (weather, plants, soils, etc.), and my encounters with the news and literature relating to the increasingly precarious climate crisis.
2. What do you want people to take away from an interaction with this work? The work is a meditation and a gesture. The slow, deliberate, mark making suggests a sensitive action or relationship that might be contrary to how we typically engage with our surroundings. I hope this work creates a space for reflection and to question how we ascribe value to the land.
3. Will you continue to make environmentally motivated work? Why or why not? As long as I am responding to the more-than-human world that surrounds me, I think it is impossible to separate that from the present ecological trouble we are in. Humans are not separate from our environment, we are part of it; we are deeply entangled. Thus, in some way, we might all have to learn to be environmentally motivated in various aspects of our lives.
Marion Wilson builds collaborative partnerships with botanists, architects, and primarily urban communities by accessing individual expertise and working nonhierarchically. As an associate professor at Syracuse University from 2007–2017, Marion Wilson institutionalized an art curriculum called “New Directions in Social Sculpture” as a result of her belief in the revitalization of urban spaces through the arts. Wilson is the founder of Mobile Literacy Arts Bus and the Mobile Field Station, a mobile eco/art lab in a collaboratively renovated RV, as well as 601 Tully—the renovation of a neglected 1,900 square foot residence, a former drug house, into a neighborhood art museum on the westside of Syracuse, New York.
Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Wilson’s collaboration with botanists has drawn her attention to moss, which functions as an environmental bio-indicator. Mosses are the earliest form of plant life; they thrive in unlikely habitats and are ubiquitous, though largely invisible, even in the densest urban centers. Mosses survive on as little as dew and are able to dry out, die, and then resurrect with water. Wilson’s study of moss is about looking closely and paying attention to what is small, omnipresent, and overlooked, while drawing parallels to the most fundamental aspects of human presence.
Marion Wilson. Preponderance of Small Things, 2019. Wood. Photo by David Broda. Courtesy of the artist.
Interview with Marion Wilson:
1. What personal experiences informed your desire to create art related to the environment? I grew up in New York City, the daughter of politicians and activists in the 1960s, so at a very young age I was campaigning on the streets of Manhattan and was aware of civil rights. We spent summers in upstate New York, however, which I loved, because my father was a state senator and it was in session in Albany in the summer. “The country,” as it was called by New Yorkers, signified freedom and play for me. But I was also aware that the lake in which we swam became increasingly polluted each summer due to the motor-boats until our final summer when it was barely swimmable at all. I understood the connection between human indulgences and industrial waste as a child through my love of this childhood lake.
Later in my 30s, when I moved to New York to become a professor at Syracuse University, I found that I was connected to this new city through its landscape. It was the land that gave me a sense of place and purpose. In 2004, another artist and I became “artists in residence” within the Solvay Wastebeds—1,400 acres of sterile soil along Onondaga Lake—a superfund site in Syracuse, New York.
2. What do you want people to take away from an interaction with these works? My interest in moss parallels my interest in looking at landscapes and communities that are usually overlooked or marginalized in some way. Not until the past ten years was the study of mosses considered a legitimate scientific study. Much of my work of 2004–2011 was what is commonly referred to as “social practice”—considered a hybrid of art and activism. I worked with diverse communities in Syracuse, mostly engaging in a kind of restorative architecture to create new constructed spaces.
In regards to my work with mosses, what I would most like is for people to pay attention. To dedicate a few minutes and consider our smallest plant species that survives only on dew. To slow down, to look closely, and to meditate on this—by observing my own careful meditation through drawing and photographing, collecting and archiving.
3. Will you continue to make environmentally motivated work? Why or why not? Yes, of course. Right now I am working on a project that condenses our complicated relationship to the environment as something that people have exploited through industry, but also how the industry itself in turn exploits humans. I am looking specifically at the Paterson, New Jersey textile mills for a show that opens in January 2020 at William Paterson University, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ryan Hoover is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher actively addressing the impact of emerging technologies on our world. Often operating at the intersection of digital and biological systems, he develops software, hardware, and biomaterials to create novel solutions to contemporary issues and open new understandings of our shared future. Arborescent Algorithms explores the compelling commonalities and resolute differences between biological code and digital code by writing programs to “grow” trees.
Photograph by Andrew Copeland. Courtesy of the artist.
Growth patterns, on the macroscale, were derived from academic research and extensive observation. These patterns were translated into an algorithm embedded in a CAD program. Through the manipulation of multiple inputs, a near infinite variety of trees can be made, resembling a wide range of different species. These trees are then 3D printed in nylon and displayed as components of digitally fabricated sculptures, or they are converted into drawings that are etched into walnut plywood with a laser cutter and in-filled with paint.
Interview with Ryan Hoover:
1. What personal experiences informed your desire to create art related to the environment? Any form of thoughtful living, during this critical moment of anthropogenic climate change, requires that we all give consideration to the environment. My practice focuses on the social and political implications of emerging technologies. Today there are many technologies, from molecular-level control of genetic code to planetary scale of climate engineering that are reshaping our understanding of nature and our relation to it. The series shown in this exhibition is a parallel exploration of work I have been doing in the biology lab working with genetic engineering and with bioprinting cells to create novel materials and form. Working with trees makes sense to me, personally, given my background in woodworking and growing up with a father who harvested timber for a living, with a keen understanding of each tree, the forest, and sustainable environmental practice.
2. What do you want people to take away from an interaction with these works? I hope that people might consider how living systems make materials and form and how these relate to our human practices of design and fabrication.
3. Will you continue to make environmentally motivated work? Why or why not? Yes. My practice is now very much invested in exploring the ways we might relate to this planet and the other living things here in a manner of collaboration and kinship, rather than one of extraction and utility. I am pursuing this through long-term projects with scientists, engineers, and other artists. Together we are creating new biomaterial and working to restore ecosystems that humans have driven to the brink.
Binh Danh reconfigures traditional photographic techniques and processes in unconventional ways to delve into the connection between history, identity, and place. As a child who immigrated to the United States from war-torn Vietnam in 1979, the memories and trauma of his diasporic experience serve as the foundation for his investigative practice. In his highly acclaimed series of chlorophyll prints, Danh uses photosynthesis to print portraits from the Vietnam War Era directly onto the surfaces of leaves. Danh is also noted for his contemporary daguerreotypes of national parks. Their reflective surfaces enable people of all backgrounds to see themselves as a part of the beauty of the American landscape.
Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Binh Danh has been making daguerreotypes of Yosemite National Park for the past decade—inserting himself and his viewers into this landscape, as a form of citizenship. In Terry Tempest Williams’ book The Open Space of Democracy, she asks us to reflect, imagine, and participate in democracy throughout the national parks. Danh’s project takes on Williams’ calling.
Interview with Binh Danh:
1. What personal experiences informed your desire to create art related to the environment? I gained an understanding of my connection to the landscape and the environment by watching Hollywood films about the Vietnam War. As a child coming to the United States as a refugee from Vietnam, the Vietnam War was a puzzling event that I tried to understand but did not have the ability to comprehend. Since my family ran a video rental business, I was able to interpret the war by watching the lush depiction of a landscape being torn apart by conflict. In 1999, I visited Vietnam for the first time since immigrating to the United States. My time in Vietnam was an emotional trip: I was taken by the peaceful landscape, but was confronted by the subtle and physical remains of the war, remnants of bomb craters that had been converted into rice paddies. This experience sparked a series where I “printed” images of the war onto tropical leaves using the chlorophyll pigment in the leaves.
At the same time, I was studying photography as an art student and I was inspired by the work of Ansel Adams and his contemporaries who created stunning black and white photography of national parks, including Yosemite National Park. I, too, wanted to make photographs like that, and I did, but ultimately felt that Adams did it the best, and there was nothing more I could say about the parks. In 2012, I mastered the daguerreotype process and started revisiting many of the same sites to photograph the same terrain as Adams. Because of the uniqueness of the daguerreotype process and mirrored finish of the silver plate, my photographs did not look like Adams. The composition is reversed, and the viewers also acknowledge themselves in the “mirror” image. In the 19th century, the daguerreotype was known as a “mirror with a memory.”
2. What do you want people to take away from an interaction with these works? I am interested in how daguerreotypes “reflect” us in these national landmarks, making a connection between us, the nation of immigrants, and to our new homeland.
3. Will you continue to make environmentally motivated work? Why or why not? I’m a landscape photographer. My work continues to explore the national park themes, as well as the issue of homelessness in the Bay Area. Due to the cost of living, people are pushed outside onto the sidewalks, underpasses, and public parks. One project focuses on Salinas’ Chinatown homeless encampment.
Exhibition photographs by Gina Erdyneeva '20, Museum Social Media Aide. Design by Janie Kreines, Curator of Academic Affairs & Community Engagement, and Lexi Breinich '13, Art Museum Assistant.