PORTFOLIO

SEEING IS BELIEVING

In 2005, environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote, “when people someday look back on our moment, the single most significant item will doubtless be the sudden spiking temperature. But they’ll have a hell of a time figuring out what it meant to us.” In the pages that follow, the work of three Bardian artists help us see what it means. “Art, like religion, is one of the ways we digest what is happening to us, make the sense out of it that proceeds to action,” McKibben concludes. Facts don’t move people, but art can.

THE NURDLES

Text and photography by Virginia Hanusik ’14

South Louisiana is home to some of the most heavily concentrated petrochemical corridors in the United States. The toxic industrial landscape that lines the 150 miles of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans has been nicknamed “Cancer Alley” because of the high rates of illness among communities living adjacent to the rampant pollution. On August 2, 2020, a shipping container filled with small plastic pellets known as “nurdles” spilled from a cargo ship at the Port of New Orleans. Nearly a billion of these pollutants were dumped into the Mississippi River and washed up on its shore for months after the incident. The disaster received little attention nationally, and penalties were not issued to the company responsible for the spill. Small-scale, volunteer cleanups were organized by individuals and environmental organizations, not by government agencies. Technically, nurdles are not considered “hazardous material,” like an oil spill or chemical waste, despite the dangers they pose to wildlife ingesting them.

I began photographing the patterns that these artificial pebbles made on the shores of the river in order to capture the relationship between pollution and the systems that enable its transportation. Water has been a primary factor in the development of the petrochemical industry in Louisiana; the Port of South Louisiana is the largest tonnage port district in the Western Hemisphere. The natural flow of the Mississippi River has been highly engineered—straightened, dredged, dammed, bound with artificial levees—to prevent changing course and destabilizing the country’s economy, which depends on it for trade.

Images of water such as flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have become synonymous with failed environmental policies that prioritize and protect certain landscapes over others. The environmental exploitation of this region has been portrayed most notably in Petrochemical America, Richard Misrach’s photographic-series-turned-ecological-atlas with landscape architect Kate Orff, which connects the fossil-fuel industry to the degradation of the surrounding ecosystems. Campaigns to restore Louisiana’s coastal wetlands continue to gain traction, but since the 1930s the state’s loss to the sea is incomprehensively vast, totaling approximately 2,000 square miles (roughly equivalent to the size of the state of Delaware).

In the canon of visuals that we use to communicate the climate crisis, disaster imagery dominates. Such photographs document the consequences of our institutional failure to stop global warming and abolish the fossil fuel industry, but often treat climate change as individualized events rather than the ongoing shift of our entire ecology that we are now experiencing daily.

Instead of a sweeping aerial view from above, for this series I’m interested in utilizing different approaches to scale and light in order to depict the ways in which the petrochemical industry is not just connected to but moves with the natural landscape. As long as we continue to use these toxic substances, each shipping tank is a potential environmental disaster. These photographs are intended to speculate on how we have normalized our connection to these chemicals and how they may appear inseparable from the scenes around us.

Woven Nº 4 (detail), 2015

WOVEN

Text and photography by Tanya Marcuse SR ’81, Artist in Residence

On a field trip in kindergarten, I got lost in the Museum of Natural History in New York City. The experience was so thrilling that the following year I got “lost” again, hiding behind the elephants until the class wandered out of sight. Alone, I peered into the nocturnal wolf diorama: December at Midnight, Gunflint Lake, Northern Minnesota. My eyes adjusted to the night scene. Two wolves seemed to run toward me, their bodies casting moon shadows, their paws leaving prints in the snow. An owl perched on a high bare branch. In the distance, the aurora borealis sprayed across the sky. The encounter was well worth the trip to the principal’s office.

It’s not surprising that photography has had a love affair with dioramas. There’s a syntactical kinship in their use of vantage point, moment, and description to create an illusion of the world, a translation of a small piece of the world. But the veracity of the diorama hinges on including actual elements of the natural world. The animal is killed, taxidermied, and painstakingly posed in a frozen instant of unfolding drama. Its wildness is contained safely in these “windows on nature” (as they’re known), creating one of the most vivid dichotomies between imperialist plunder and conservation. I think of the famous taxidermist Carl Akeley’s crisis on his 1921 expedition to the Congo to “collect” gorillas. He was so moved by what he saw that he filmed the gorillas instead of killing them and spent the rest of his life on a mission of environmental conservation and education.

In Woven Nº 33 (next page) there’s a play on this life-to-death-to-lifelike passage of the diorama. The five-foot-by-ten-foot wooden structure on which I composed the scene is like a garden bed tilted up at a 45-degree angle, terraced to hold dirt, plants, and rocks. A shallow living and dying diorama. Each Woven piece is constructed on this same frame, the remains or ruins of one piece becoming the foundations of the next.

Woven Nº 33, 2019 62” x 124”

Most of the works from the Woven series (including Woven No. 4, opposite) feature dead and decaying flora and fauna; they foreground the cycles of growth and decay. But for Woven Nº 33 I wanted to create an image filled with life. I composed a living woodland scene, or stage set, for the rescue owls (Leo the saw-whet and Linus the screech owl) that I’d arranged to be brought in on the day of the shoot. I transplanted forget-me-nots, borrowed frogs from nearby swamps, composed mossy branches, and designed a small stream bed to trickle down the left side of the frame. An artifice of naturalism. I photographed this elaborate tableau from a scaffold, beneath a huge canopy in my backyard, the plants and animals gathered from my immediate surroundings.

Transformed into a photograph, its scale slightly larger than life, it gives a sense of immersion and awe—the same feelings that thrilled my first-grade self as I gazed at those hunting night wolves.

Winds (Lolohe), 2020 Blood and/or ink on archival pigment print 17” x 17”

THE WINDS

Text and photography by Tara Cronin ICP ’10

Wind can produce gentle yet monumental structures. Though we are surrounded by them, when we explore the mechanisms of what wind can do, the monuments left behind only become more mysterious. Sea spray ineffably defies gravity, a cavernous abyss is carefully etched into the depths of the Earth, perfectly formed hills echo the majestic architecture of the pyramids in the Valley of the Kings. A deeper exploration of wind makes the observer marvel at the omnipresent intelligence carried within it.

This project speaks to the hidden and the esoteric; that which is transmitted privately and orally or via keen hearing. Many mysterious and hidden landscapes are buried in myth, disinformation, topsoil, taboo, allegory, puns, rhymes, and rumors. These shattered pieces of truth are transmitted across generations. The thin veil that cloaks all nature and all landscapes can be accessed only by listening carefully with tools other than our ears. I try to identify what that veil might be (dark matter? starstuff?). Practicing speaking with the winds helps me speak with myself.

Tactility and mark-making play a role in many of my pieces. I shoot film, usually medium or large format, then scan and print on archival paper, and finish by handdrawing and making repeated marks directly onto each print. I came to this process as a result of frustration with the camera and straightforward photography. And I have my partner of 21 years, Ed Chen, to thank. Ed is a scientist—his focuses are electrochemistry and physics, and a main focus is climate change. While doing an experiment in our apartment, he decided to test a material that I was using to make non-camera, photo-based work, and it ended up proving effective. Science and art often overlap in this way. Both artists and scientists are driven by wanting to learn more, to experiment, to find out the hows and the whys, to dig more deeply into a particular topic, to look for solutions.

Soft, 2020 Blood and/or ink on archival pigment print 17” x 17”

Science is sometimes cited as an “inspiration” for artists’ thinking processes. But art is often the avant-garde that breaks up the orthodoxy of science, so that science can explore new ideas outside its accepted limits. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that in the years when Einstein was refining his very new ideas on relativity, the Cubist movement was also beginning to thrive. Cubism highlighted the concept of looking at the “same” thing, a familiar thing, from a wholly new perspective. Humans had been thinking for generations about the question, What is space? Einstein just had the frame of mind and the vision to look at the question differently.

The possibilities that come with the cross-pollination between the two fields fill me with excitement; art and science are similar in process, but like two interlocking puzzle pieces, if they are never placed side by side, the potential for symbiosis is lost. In a way, art and science are two of the potent winds of society.

Snow, 2020 Blood and/or ink on archival pigment print 17” x 17”