Climate Conversations: All We Can Save _ Exhibition Catalog

CLIMATE CONVERSATIONS: ALL WE CAN SAVE

Nancy Cohen Kate Dodd Laura Earle Tracey Easthope Elizabeth Barick Fall Susan Hoffman Fishman Gina R. Furnari Leslie Sobel

Editing: Leslie Sobel Essay by Susan Hoffman Fishman Layout Design: Gina R. Furnari Photo Editing: Elizabeth Barick Fall, Laura Earle, and Gina R. Furnari Contents © 2022 by the Authors and Artists.

All rights to the works herein are reserved by their owners.

CLIMATE CONVERSATIONS: ALL WE CAN SAVE Exhibition Venues: 22 North Gallery, Ypsilanti, Michigan July 2, to August 22, 2021 Janice Charach Gallery, West Bloomfield, Michigan January 16 – March 3, 2022 Nuture Nature Center, Easton, Pennsylvania April 8 – June 29, 2022 Funding for this catalog was provided by the Nurture Nature Center (who receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) and through support from the Nurture Nature Foundation.

W

hen eight women artists from the Midwest and the East Coast of the United States came together via Zoom during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to read and discuss a newly published book on climate change, none of them predicted what would evolve from their conversations.

The book, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Ph.D. and Katharine K. Wilkinson, Ph.D., contains essays and poetry by a cadre of diverse women policy wonks, scientists, writers, journalists, lawyers, activists and others who address the most critical existential issue of our time with the intention of offering different ways to effect change and mend the significant damage that we have caused to the Earth.

Image right: Details of works by; Kate Dodd, Elizabeth Barick Fall, Laura Earle, Nancy Cohen, Tracey Easthope, Gina R Furnari, Susan Hoffman Fishman, Leslie Sobel. Photo by Elizabeth Barick Fall.

Coalescence Mostly strangers to each other, the eight artists coalesced into a cohesive unit as they met regularly throughout 2020—2021 and digested the essays, section by section. Looking back on the process, which ultimately morphed into this powerful group exhibition of artwork inspired by the content in the book, each artist expressed its essential impact on them and on their artistic practices:

For multi-media artist Elizabeth Barick Fall (Ann Arbor Michigan), the group became an oasis of support during an enormously challenging time. She regards the collabo– rative and respectful way in which the artists worked together to be a worthy model for what can happen on a larger scale if individuals, communities and countries join forces to combat climate change.

To sculptor and installation artist Nancy Cohen (Jersey City, New Jersey), the opportunity to meet and work with artists outside of her “Northeast bubble” was enriching, especially during the pandemic when access to people in general was so limited. She had never developed work based on concepts expressed in a book before and found it to be both challenging and rewarding.

Painter and public artist Susan Hoffman Fishman (West Hartford, Connecticut) was grateful to be part of a group of such generous and talented women who provided lively camaraderie and supportive feedback to one another. For her, the rich discussions around the provocative ideas expressed in the book were emotionally moving, intellectually challenging and personally inspiring.

For site-specific installation artist Kate Dodd (Orange, New Jersey), being in a group of likeminded women with art-making in common was critical to getting through the pandemic and dealing with the despair brought about when addressing the often-overwhelming issues relating to the climate crisis.

As the youngest member of the group by far, Gina R. Furnari, (West Caldwell, New Jersey) a painter and process artist, loved being with women who were more advanced in their practices and had lived full lives. She felt as if she had been given a “room full of mentors,” who, along with her, were learning how to function in a world that has been entirely transformed by a global pandemic and a global climate crisis.

Multi-media artist and independent curator Laura Earle (Detroit, Michigan) loved the community building that the conversations brought about, the friendships that emerged and the sense that the authors of the essays, speaking to them in a different dimension, were part of their virtual gatherings.

Tracey Easthope, (Ann Arbor, Michigan) a full-time environmental activist as well as an artist, relished the opportunity to engage with the topic of climate change in a non-linear, non-rational way that was so different from the strategic, cerebral work that she has conducted over the past thirty years.

What intrigued multi-media artist Leslie Sobel, (Ann Arbor, Michigan) about the year-long group process was learning how differently each artist approached the content of the essays and translated the material into a diverse range of paintings, sculpture, animation, projection, photographs and installations.

Expression

Although the eight artists in the group were inspired by different essays and ideas found in the book, there are a number of common themes that are expressed in many of their individual works. These include: the power of storytelling as a vehicle for providing alternate ways of looking at the non-human world and the climate crisis; the importance of community and place as a starting point for change; the interconnectedness of all living beings; the need to regard non-human beings as equal partners on Earth in order to restore what we have harmed; and the complex political, economic and social nature of the climate crisis.”

Each of the artist’s responses to All We Can Save: Truth, Cour— age and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, which together form the exhibition Climate Conversations: All We Can Save, are highlighted on the following pages.

“Mending the fabric of the physical landscape at a local scale, as in Jamaica Bay, or at a regional scale, as a Mississippi River National Park would, shows us a way forward. Reviving our nation’s green-blue infrastructure is the collective work of our time.”

From “Mending the Landscape” by Kate Orff

Nancy Cohen, Between, 2021 Paper pulp, ink, kozo fibers and handmade paper 21 x 60 inches Photo by Elizabeth Barick Fall

Nancy Cohen

Nancy Cohen is passionate about water, so much so that much of her work for the past 12 years has focused on the topic. Her large-scale installations are the product of significant research on the history and ecosystems of individual waterways that have been damaged by human interventions and climate change, particularly near where she has lived and worked. These include the Hudson and Hackensack Rivers, which border Jersey City, New Jersey, her home town.

Cohen’s constructed drawings are comprised primarily of paper that she makes herself, along with other media chosen to serve her vision for the pieces. Her decision to use paper as the foundation for her work is based on her commitment to materials that reflect a connection to water and to the water— way sites themselves. To her, “Water is an intrinsic component in making paper. During the paper-making process, the artist is literally immersed in water. Papermaking can also accommodate grasses and other natural materials that are embedded in the paper itself.”

Because of her focus on the local bodies of water that she knows, Cohen was drawn to the authors in All We Can Save who emphasized working within local communities to achieve long term change, including Kate Orff (“Mending the Landscape”) and Jainey K. Bavishi (“A Tale of Three Cities”).

1

Nancy Cohen, Barrier, 2021 Paper pulp, ink, kozo fibers and handmade paper 15 x 61 inches Courtesy of the artist

Nancy Cohen, JB Marsh Drawing, 2021 Paper pulp, ink, kozo fibers and handmade paper 15 x 61 inches Photo by Elizabeth Barick Fall

Based on a map of the area, Cohen’s drawing, Between, refere— nces the reality of living in a city that exists between two major rivers. The site of severe devastation during Hurricane Sandy, Jersey City - like other areas in and around Manhattan and Brooklyn still dealing with aftereffects of that extreme water event - is in the process of executing plans to shore up the land against future storms.

Using research that she conducted after reading “A Tale of Three Cities,’ which discusses the resiliency plan for the redesign of Manhattan’s East River Park, Cohen created Barrier. The dynamic drawing portrays an active body of water slamming up against a riverbank, while in the background, a flimsy series of mesh fencing attempts to serve as a barrier against the inevitable rising waters.

For JB Marsh Drawing, Cohen responded to Kate Orff’s essay, “Mending the Landscape,” which addresses the disappearing marshes of Jamaica Bay, an estuary on the western tip of Long Island, New York. Marshes provide vital functions to river and coastal ecologies, including buffering the shorelines against stormy seas, slowing shoreline erosion and providing habitats for fish and wildlife. In JB Marsh Drawing, Cohen shows us the beautifully complex and intricate system that sustains marshlands, now at risk from rising tides and the increase in severe storms brought about by climate change.

Kate Dodd

Kate Dodd has spent her entire adult life using found materials to create temporary, site-specific installations that improved or “mended” her environment. First as an art student in the harsh urban spaces of New York City and then as an art teacher in New Jersey, she was intent on repurposing cast-off “stuff ” rather than wasting it or contributing to our rampant commercial culture by buying new “stuff.” She explains, “there’s always a little bit about redemption in my work; I save things, transform them, and in the process, give them value.”

In All We Can Save, Dodd related strongly to the authors who acknowledged the sadness and grief that many of us are experiencing as a result of the climate crisis. She found the specific language attributed to this grieving process – “pretraumatic stress disorder,” “eco-anxiety” and “solastalgia” – to be sadly comforting in the same way that we often feel better when others articulate and share their own feelings and experiences that are similar to ours.

Two of the pieces that Dodd developed for this exhibition express her sorrow over the treatment and plight of climate refugees and migrants, which are addressed in Sarah Stillman’s essay “Like the Monarch” and in “Under the Weather”

by Ash Sanders. Her third piece, an installation, conveys her enormous concern over the uncertain futures of the children she taught for thirty years.

For Migrants, Dodd combined repurposed legal envelopes with images of birds that she cut out of old books. To her, envelopes suggest a connection to the institutional worlds of banking and law. Sealed at the top, they are meant to be private, exclusive and excluding. In Migrants, the bird photos are staring out at us from behind a wall of windows and are perched above a wall of envelopes. They have become a metaphor for people who are trapped behind a border, through no fault of their own, and kept out of an exclusive place where they are not allowed to go.

Kate Dodd, Migrants, 2021 Photo by Jennifer Patselas

“Dominant groups have long used menacing metaphors from the natural world to frame migration debates. Swarms, surges, hordes - animal allusions offer nouns of choice to degrade and belittle, to rationalize subjugation and criminalize survival.”

From “Like the Monarch” by Sarah Stillman.

Kate Dodd, No Place To Land (installation view at 22 North Gallery), 2021 Photo by Jennifer Patselas

The envelopes and bird images appear again in No Place to Land.

This time, however, the envelopes contain clear windows, which are usually used to reveal addresses, but instead, Dodd has placed the bird photos behind the envelope windows as if the birds are trying to break through the barrier. Just like people seeking refuge after long journeys as climate refugees, the migrating birds have nowhere to land and replenish themselves.

The installation Climbing Threat is comprised of repurposed student watercolor paintings of abstract microscopic organi— sms that Dodd has cut into lung-shaped silhouettes and hung so that they cascade from the ceiling onto the floor in multiple configurations, like an invasive species. Since lungs are the most exposed organs of our bodies, absorbing pollutants and airborne germs into our bodies, the lung-shaped cut-outs are an especially effective metaphor for the existential threat caused by climate change to the lives of the children whose work is part of the installation.

Kate Dodd, Climbing Threat (Installation view at 22 North Gallery), 2021 Coutesy of the artist

Kate Dodd, Climbing Threat (Installation view at 22 North Gallery), 2021 Coutesy of the artist

Laura Earle

Laura Earle, House of Cards, 2021 Photo by Salvadore Rodriguez

“The scale of human dislocation yet to come from the climate crisis verges on the unimaginable… ‘Like the monarch butterfly,’ notes the artist Favianna Rodriguez, ‘human beings cross borders in order to survive.’ ” From “Like the Monarch” by Sarah Stillman

With a background in furniture design, graphics, woodworking and metalworking, Laura Earle began making works of art in 2018. Besides being an artist, she is also an independent curator of exhibitions on critical contemporary issues, including gender and racial equality as well as climate change. The work in the most recent exhibitions that she has curated (Unraveling Racism in 2019 and Womxnhouse Detroit in 2021), like the work in Climate Conversations: All We Can Save, emerged from conversations and collaborations among groups of artists who came together to form supportive communities.

All We Can Save introduced Earle to Indigenous viewpoints related to the climate crisis, an Indigenous language structure that is focused on action (verbs) rather than on objects (nouns) like ours does and a value system that places non-human life on an equal par with human life. Through the readings and group conversations, she recognized the widespread anxiety that exists around climate-related issues and the need to put forth hopeful, viable actions that individuals can take right now.

House of Cards, the first three-dimensional piece that Earle ­completed for Climate Conversations, was inspired by a memory Earle had as a child in second grade. Upon seeing the now-­famous image of Earth called “The Blue Marble,” which was taken in 1972 from space, she remembers realizing for the first time that she was not just living in her own community but was part of a larger world; she was indeed a global citizen. Using that same NASA image and the same feelings of belonging and responsibility towards the planet, Earle printed several decks of cards with each card being a section of “The Blue Marble” image. She then built a standing house of cards, the kind we have all made at some point in our lives. This house of cards, though, alludes both to the precarious nature of Earth – a planet that is in danger of collapsing under our watch - and to our need for hypervigilance to ensure that it doesn’t.

Greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, are those that contribute to the greenhouse effect by trapping heat close to the Earth’s surface and causing the global temperature to rise. In her kinetic sculpture, Greenhouse Gases, Earle is visualizing clouds of gases hovering above us as we go about our daily lives. Comprised of repurposed, laser-cut mirrored acrylic, which represent the molecular structures of greenhouse gasses in correct proportion to our current atmosphere, the sculpture activates the floor by casting shadows and reflections and moving when visitors disturb the air in its space.

Image right: Laura Earle, Greenhouse Gases (detail), 2021 Kinetic Sculpture Photo by Elizabeth Barick Fall

Like Kate Dodd, Earle also created a piece inspired by the essays in All We Can Save that addresses climate refugees. Appalled by the conditions faced by refugees at our border with Mexico and cognizant of how desperate one has to be to leave one’s home and country, she constructed a second kinetic sculpture called Climate Refugees, consisting of three figures suspended from the ceiling. The family of figures wander around each other and are illuminated from within, suggesting that these are human beings without a home, without their feet on the ground, but with souls and feelings like our own.

Laura Earle, Climate Refugees (detail), 2021 Coutesy of the artist

Tracey Easthope Tracey Easthope has always felt a deep affinity for the natural world, a connection that was only strengthened by her classes as an undergraduate student in geography - the field of study emphasizing the relationship between human beings and their environments. Following her early interest in the physical properties of the Earth’s surface and the human societies spread across it, she has served for the past 32 years as an environmental advocate on a local, regional and global level.

With an area of specialty in the toxic chemicals that have contaminated our bodies and our air, water and land, she has seen and addressed some of the worst contamination on Earth.

Easthope’s artwork incorporates both her personal connection to the natural world as well as her conviction that the way in which we have behaved towards it has to change. She believes strongly in the interconnectedness and equality of all living beings, and that our consumer culture is a spiritual crisis at the heart of the climate crisis. All of these beliefs inform her creative process.

Having seen the overwhelming obstacles that stand in the way of enacting policy changes that would benefit the health of human beings and the Earth itself, Easthope has moved through feelings of deep despair to a hard-won sense of hope.

In doing so, she related to the authors in All We Can Save who spoke to the topic of hope. Her two pieces in the exhibition, Climate Couture Parade and Climate Prophets, acknowledge the collective energy of those individuals throughout history and all over the world who have worked hopefully and are working hopefully for change.

As she explored how to represent hope through visual art, Easthope imagined a party, a parade; something beautiful, fun and celebratory. Her celebratory vision led her to create the Climate Couture Parade, a series of eight drawings of individuals wearing costumes that illustrate some of the solutions recommended for combatting climate change (“The Solar Cell,” “The Geothermal,” “The Pollinator,” etc.). These individuals are engaged in positive ways to improve the world and are inviting others to join them. The costumes they wear add to the gayety and to Easthope, they represent all of us marching forward together.

“I call on all the Grand Mothers of Earth & every person who possesses the Grand Mother spirit of respect for life & protection of the young to rise & lead. The life of our species depends on it. & I call on all men of Earth to gracefully and gratefully stand aside & let them (let us) do so.”

From “Calling All Grand Mothers” by Alice Walker

Tracey Easthope. The climate orders and the climate parade, 2021 Digital prints Series of 8, 11” x 17” each

For her second series of 5 drawings, Easthope asked and responded to the questions: Who are the prophets in our midst during this time of crisis?

Who are the people communicating to us the truths that are important for our survival?

In many cultures and religions, prophets were individuals who were in contact with the divine and served as intermediaries between the divine and humanity, delivering messages that would impact humanity’s wellbeing. In her piece, The Prophets, Easthope assigns the title of prophet to mushrooms, frogs and other sentinel species who are harbingers of environmental danger and are warning us, like the prophets of old, to change our ways before it is too late.

Image right, Tracey Easthope. The climate prophets and the altarpiece, 2021 Photos, acrylic, pencil, ply wood Series of 5, 17” x 5” each

Elizabeth Barick Fall

Although Elizabeth Barick Fall has lived in Michigan her whole life, she didn’t appreciate the beauty and importance of its Great Lakes, which represent one-fifth of the world’s fresh water resources, until she was an adult. Feeling a deep sense of belonging to her home state, she is passionate about the need to protect the health of the lakes, especially Lake Michigan’s Sturgeon Bay where her family has a home. In All We Can Save, Fall was inspired by both the no-nonsense approach to writing about climate change and the feminist outlook that Emily Atkins espoused in her essay “Truth Be Told.”

For the past seven years, Fall has carefully photographed the changes that have occurred to her strip of land alongside Sturgeon Bay as a result of the ferocious storm systems, high winds and warmer temperatures brought about by the climate crisis. In 2020, Lake Michigan’s water levels reached a record high. 20 – 30-foot waves crashed into the shoreline, eroding the bluff outside Fall’s home, decimating the dunes and a staircase to her cottage that had been in place for 40+ years, and destroying countless trees, plants and animal habitats. Her before-and-after photographs of this devastation became the basis for her three works of art in this exhibition. Like Cohen, she used the example of her local environment to represent a more universal phenomenon.

In Bleeding Her Dry: 1, 2, 3 and 4, Fall printed photographs of the shoreline destruction onto 4 pieces of fabric that were then attached to wooden frames. With a purposeful effort to acknowledge the disproportionate impact of climate change on women, she incorporated embroidery and weaving, traditional female crafts, in the piece. Nodding to her female ancestors, she used ribbon and red thread, once belonging to her grandmother and sewn to look as if it was dripping blood, as a fitting metaphor for environmental loss. The mother of four young women, Fall is adamant that the female voice be heard in the conversation on climate change.

Elizabeth Barick Fall, Bleeding Her Dry I, II, III, IV, 2021 Inkjet print on cotton,thread,jute,driftwood approx 18”x14” each Photo by Elizabeth Barick Fall

“My journalism professors taught me our job was to provide those words to give citizens the information they need to solve society’s most complex problems. Wayne (reporter Wayne Barret of the Village Voice) taught me our responsibility was to do that fearlessly, with righteous anger on behalf of society’s most vulnerable.”

From “Truth Be Told” by Emily Atkins

As a metalsmith, Fall collects old metal objects from junk shops and other locales, and creates artwork from them that has contemporary meaning. In Before and After: High Water and Climate Change in 2020, she attached photographic prints of her Sturgeon Bay coastline before and after its destruction onto two old, circular, saw blades. The blade containing the “before” image is motorized to turn counterclockwise as if it is turning back time, while the other blade with the “after” image, spins forward. Moving time backwards and forwards, the blades simulate an abstract kaleidoscope, presenting multiple points of view at once.

For I Witness, Fall used a vintage steel lawn roller to construct a second motorized sculpture. With encaustic medium, she transferred three vertical panorama photographs of herself observing the damages to the bluff and staircase onto the surface of the roller’s drum. As the drum moves in a forward circular pattern, it appears as if it is steamrolling towards us, much like the seemingly unstoppable effects of climate change.

Elizabeth Barick Fall, Before and After: HIgh Water and Climate Change in 2020 (installation view at 22 North Gallery), 2021 Repurposed steel refuse, encaustic, photo image transfer 23.5” x 23.5”, 25” x 25” Photo by Elizabeth Barick Fall

Elizabeth Barick Fall, I Witness, 2021 Repurposed steel refuse, encaustic, photo image transfer, jute 40” x 22” x 12” Photo by Elizabeth Barick Fall

Susan Hoffman Fishman “We need different stories, ones that help us envision a present in which humans live in concert with our environment. One in which we eat, play, move, and live in ways that are not just lighter on the Earth but also nurturing to us as humans, with at least some of the trappings that many of us have come to expect of modern life.”

From “Wakanda Doesn’t Have Suburbs” by Kendra Pierre-Louis

All of Susan Hoffman Fishman’s paintings and public art projects over the past 10+ years have focused on water in the context of the climate crisis - rising tides, plastic oceans, the threat of water wars, rampikes (dead trees along our coastlines whose roots have been exposed to salt water from rising sea levels) and most recently, the proliferation of sinkholes around the world caused by shrinking bodies of water and melting permafrost. In keeping with her enduring passion for water, Fishman three pieces in Climate Conversations: All We Can Save encompass water-related imagery.

Susan Hoffman Fishman, In the Beginning There Was Only Water, 2020 - 2021 Acrylic, oil pigment stick and mixed media on paper 30 in. x 50 ft. Photo by Elizabeth Barick Fall

While reading All We Can Save, Fishman was “viscerally struck” by Kendra Pierre-Louis’ essay, “Wakanda Doesn’t Have Suburbs.” It was Pierre-Louis’ call for new stories that inspired her – new stories to counteract the biblical creation myth that cast humans as superior to nature. This human-focused world view has justified our relentless appetite to use and abuse the Earth’s resources in any way we choose, without regard to the impact of our actions on non-human beings – including the rivers, oceans, forests, land and atmosphere – upon whom we depend for our own survival. According to Pierre-Louis, the biblical creation myth set human beings on a destructive path that evolved, over the millennia, into our “innate tendency to destroy the environment” ever since “Eve, allegedly, took a bite of that damn apple.”

In response to Pierre-Louis’ cry for new stories, Fishman decided to retell the biblical creation myth - in which “man” was granted “dominion” over all the Earth’s plants and animals – as a non-human-centric story, which she describes as “an abstract and liberal interpretation of what scientists have determined really happened at the creation of the planet and for the billions of years that followed.” Entitled In the Beginning There Was Only Water, the piece is comprised of 39 mixed media paintings on paper, each 30” x 15,” that are hung without any space between the panels. The extended horizontal format of the piece creates a dramatic running narrative that begins approximately 3.8 billion years ago, when our fiery planet started to cool and the rains began to fall, filling up the basins that eventually became the primeval ocean.

Susan Hoffman Fishman, In the Beginning There Was Only Water, detail, 2020 - 2021 Acrylic, oil pigment stick and mixed media on paper 30 in. x 50 ft Photo by Elizabeth Barick Fall

The visual narrative of In the Beginning There Was Only Water goes on to include the geological formation of land, volcanoes, mountains and bodies of water; the emergence of single and multiple-cell organisms; the appearance of algae that eventually led to the creation of the first plants; the birth of animal life; and throughout it all, the presence of water, the essential element that sustains life itself. Incorporating materials such as gauze and hand-made papers on the panels, her paintings are highly textured. Walking the full length of this nearly 50-foot piece, we sense the primal energy associated with the violent origins of our planet and the teeming life forms created in its aftermath. Fishman’s use of line and linear forms is especially effective in emphasizing movement and invites the viewer to travel along physically and intellectually with the story across time from panel to panel.

Fishman’s two other paintings on paper in the exhibition, In the Beginning There Was Only Water II and On the 3 Billionth Day Algae Made the Plant World, are both large-scale (5 ft. x 5 ft.) visions of the natural world’s creative power. Inspired by the same Pierre-Louis essay, Fishman used dense layers of acrylic and mixed media in In the Beginning…II to evoke a roiling, primordial sea, while in On the 3 Billionth Day…, she provides an aerial view of the unfolding birth of plant life.

Susan Hoffman Fishman, In the Beginning There Was Only Water II, 2020 Acrylic and mixed media on paper, 5 ft. x 5 ft.

Photo by Elizabeth Barick Fall

Susan Hoffman Fishman, On the 3 Billionth Day Algae Created the Plant World, 2021 Acrylic, oil pigment stick and mixed media on paper 5 ft. x 5 ft.

Photo by Elizabeth Barick Fall

Gina R. Furnari

Gina R. Furnari’s work, like both Cohen’s and Fall’s, emanates from her strong attachment to place; in her case, the land and life along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in New Jersey where she lives and works. She is fascinated by the edge of the sea, the ever-moving line that exists between land and water.

During her regular walks up and down the local beaches at all times of the year and in all types of weather, Furnari carefully observes the changes in light that occur throughout the day, the living beings that exist in this environment and the emotional responses she experiences while she conducts these vigils.

Because this process – watching, feeling, translating what she is seeing into imagery and collapsing time in order to capture a particular moment - is how she would go about making a painting, she considers all of her work, including animation, projections and performance pieces to be paintings. She readily asserts that “there is not much difference between a pixel, a tiny component of a digital image, and a particle of paint.”

In light of her interest in place and belonging, Furnari identified strongly with Leah Cardamore’s essay, “A Field Guide for Transformation,” in which she described “ever widening circles of connection, community and scale” beginning with local associations, to be fundamental elements for transformation. Her three pieces in the exhibition all relate to her daily walks along the local beaches and her recent experiences as an artist-in-residence with Cape May Whale Watch and Research, an eco-tourism and research association in Cape May, New Jersey.

The animation, Surface Tension Part I, references the pushpull tension that exists at the edge of the sea as the tides move in and out, blurring the boundaries between land and sea. It also incorporates the visceral connection she feels during her solitary walks to the thousands (millions?) of people in the past who also stopped at the same spots, watched the same waves and waited like she did for whatever was to come next.

Image right: Gina R. Furnari, Stills from Surfafce Tension Part 1, 2021 Digital Animation; Courtesy of the artist

“…all life is both sovereign and interdependent, and … each element within creation (including humans) has the right and the responsibility to respectfully coexist within the larger system of life.”

From “Indigenous Prophecy and Mother Earth”

by Sherri Mitchell – Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset of the Penawahpskek Nation

Gina R. Furnari, In Out Across (detail still), 2021 Digital Animation Courtesy of the artist

Gina R. Furnari, Installation views of Surface Tension Part 2, 2021 Installation with digital animated projection

In Out Across is a visual representation of how Furnari interprets time and space. The animation reveals first one gannet, a bird Furnari observed repeatedly diving headfirst “like so many spears” into the water to hunt for fish. It is penetrating the space between water and sky and then is followed in the animation by a second bird. We ask ourselves, “are we really seeing two birds consecutively or is this one bird flying at different time periods, in different planes, through space?”

In Surface Tension Part II, Furnari uses projection to demonstrate how light patterns move across the surface of the ocean. Standing away from the projection, we can observe the water as if we are on a boat watching the sea. If we stand under the projection, however, the image of the light on the water is upon us – distorted and oddly disquieting.

Gina R. Furnari, Surface Tension Part 2 (projection still), 2021 Installation with digital animated projection

Leslie Sobel

Leslie Sobel, Interwoven Ecologies, 2021 Mixed media with woven paper, digital prints, encaustic monotype and stitching.

Photo credit Jennifer Patselas

Leslie Sobel’s work addresses water and climate change, including the condition of lakes and river systems near her home in Michigan. She is deeply concerned about the pollution, flooding and environmental damage that climate change has caused to our continental watersheds and is equally distressed about the increase in harmful algae blooms in Lake Erie and elsewhere - the overgrowth of microscopic algae or algae-like bacteria in fresh, salt, or brackish waters - that can sicken or kill people and animals. The fact that the public does not respond seriously to the daily danger posed by the blooms, which result from excessive run-off of manmade fertilizers and chemicals combined with excessive heat and water, is both disheartening and alarming to her.

“Soul and soil are not separate. Neither are wind and spirit, nor water and tears. We are eroding and evolving, at once, like the red rock landscape before me. Our grief is our love. Our love will be our undoing as we quietly disengage from the collective madness of the patriarchal mind that says aggression is the way forward.”

Terry Tempest Williams

As the daughter of two scientists, Sobel is finely attuned to scientific systems and often collaborates with scientists in the field, incorporating data and maps into her mixed media pieces.

In addition to her focus on local climate-related issues, she has worked with glaciologists in Yukon Territory and with other scientists who are studying the effects of climate change on the high latitudes. By combining components of both science and art in her work, she provides multiple perspectives on the subject matter she is addressing.

Sobel reacted strongly to the references in All We Can Save that emphasized the interconnectedness among all living beings as well as the interrelationships between human behavior, ecosystems and climate. Interwoven Ecologies, one of her three mixed media pieces in the exhibition, is a visual representation of the vital connections that all species have with one another.

To construct Interwoven Ecologies, Sobel created multiple stencils of birds, plants and animals, including microscopic organisms, from which she made individual monoprints.

She then glued some of the prints directly onto the surface of the paper; and others she cut into strips and wove together.

The final image resulting from this process is a powerful and visceral statement on the equality of every living species and our interdependence on one another for survival.

Leslie Sobel, Lake Erie Algae Bloom 1, 2 and 3, 2021 Photo credit Jennifer Patselas

Sobel’s triptych, Lake Erie Algae Bloom 1, 2 and 3, and her diptych, Water Blues 1 and 2, both deal with the contradiction between the horrific nature of algae blooms and their visual beauty. A pivotal trip she took to the Maumee Bay State Park Beach in Ohio, located where the Maumee River enters Lake Erie, served as inspiration for these works. To get to the beach, Sobel traveled through the highly industrialized areas of Toledo and past mansions and a golf club whose lawns had been sprayed with chemicals until she reached her destination and a bold sign warning that the area was toxic. Wanting to collect water samples of the algae, she went ahead anyway and experienced significant irritation to her eyes and nose. Once home, she placed the water samples under her microscope; created photographs of the samples by holding a digital camera over the microscope’s eyepiece; and used the photographs to create enticing encaustic prints recording the toxicity of the water and its terrible beauty.

Leslie Sobel, Water Blues 1, 2021 Photo credit Jennifer Patselas

Leslie Sobel, Water Blues 2, 2021 Photo credit Jennifer Patselas

If anything unites the diverse group of painters, sculptors and installation, mixed media and process artists who came together during a global pandemic to read and discuss a book on an unprecedented existential threat, it is passion to save our planet. With passion, they have drawn upon their innate abilities and the power of art to tell stories of re-creation, the importance of place and community, the need for empathy and kindness, the natural ties we have to all living beings and the prophets among us who will light the way.

If anything in All We Can Save: Truth Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis describes this group of artists and their work accurately, it is this poem by Adrienne Rich:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed ­ I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

Endings and Beginnings

Installation view of Climate Conversations: All We Can Save at Janice Charach Gallery, 2022 Photo by Elizabeth Barick Fall

Acknowledgements The artists in Climate Conversations: All We Can Save are grateful to Keri Maxfield, Art Director and Rachel Hogan Carr, Executive Director of the Nurture Nature Center, along with their entire staff, for their enthusiasm, financial contributions and support of this exhibition project. We are especially delighted to have had the opportunity to show our work in such a dynamic and progressive institution.

Special thanks to Ayana E. Johnson, Katharine K. Wilkinson, Emily Atkin, Xiye Bastida, Ellen Bass, Colette Pichon Battle, Jainey K. Bavishi, Janine Benyus, adrienne maree brown, Régine Clément, Abigail Dillen, Camille T. Dungy, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Joy Harjo, Katharine Hayhoe, Jane Hirshfield, Mary Anne Hitt, Ailish Hopper, Tara Houska Zhaabowekwe, Emily N. Johnston, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Madeleine Jubilee Saito, Naomi Klein, Kate Knuth, Ada Limón, Louise Maher-Johnson, Kate Marvel, Gina McCarthy, Anne Haven McDonnell, Sarah Miller, Sherri Mitchell, Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset, Susanne C. Moser, Lynna Odel, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Kate Orff, Jacqui Patterson, Leah Penniman, Catherine Pierce, Marge Piercy, Kendra Pierre-Louis, Varshini Prakash, Janisse Ray, Christine E. Nieves Rodriguez, Favianna Rodriguez, Cameron Russell, Ash Sanders, Judith D. Schwartz, Patricia Smith, Emily Stengel, Sarah Stillman, Leah Cardamore Stokes, Amanda Sturgeon, Maggie Thomas, Heather McTeer Toney, Alexandria Villaseñor, Alice Walker, Amy Westervelt, Jane Zelikova for their inspiring words, and the All We Can Save Project for creating a space for so many to come together.

Excerpts and quotations reproduced in this essay were taken from All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana E. Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson, 2020.

In honor of the women whose essays form the content of All We Can Save, the text in this catalogue is set entirely in typefaces designed by women: Torfino by Alanna Munro and Edita by Pilar Cano.

Many thanks to Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss for including Climate Conversations: All We Can Save in its global project.

Nancy Cohen - nancymcohen.com Kate Dodd - katedodd.com Laura Earle - lauraearle.com Tracey Easthope - studioidir.net Elizabeth Barick Fall - lizbarickfall.com Susan Hoffman Fishman - susanhoffmanfishman.com Gina R. Furnari - ginafurnaristudio.com Leslie Sobel - lesliesobel.com

2022