FOUR DEGREES: ECO-ANXIETY AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Artist Statements

Catalina Arenguren

During the pandemic, my “eye” has turned downward, as my daily travel and exposure to subjects is limited; a documentation of the remains I found on the ground: dead plants, frozen ground, reflections and refractions in water. These images have forced me to consider the consequences of climate change, including excess heat, excess cold, drastic changes in the seasons. My photography seems to have become a visualization of the challenges of a warming planet.

Leah Dyjak

A Force Majeure, or superior force, is a common clause for corporations to add to a contract. It protects parties from liability in the event of an act of God or bad global circumstances. These “events” include war, strike, riot, crime, hurricane, flood, earthquake, volcanic eruption, a global pandemic- things catastrophic, unforeseeable. The fragments in these photographic installations make use of a collapsed parking lot along the shoreline of coastal Massachusetts. The form of the installation attempts to convey what the camera lens and prints alone cannot. The point of focus: the mutability of boundary, frame, instability of surface, and the erasure of boundary. The work represents the material failure of both the medium of photography and our infrastructure, specifically relating to water and seismic activity. As we have attempted to bend the natural world to our capitalistic needs, the effects of this hubris are made visible in erratic weather patterns and the mangled landscape of the everyday.

Lindsay M. Godin

I have been capturing images of human-caused wildfires and its resulting physical destruction upon the western landscape. I photograph sites that deliberately portray tight vantage points and unrevealing horizons to symbolize a pessimistic and unforeseeable future pertaining to climate change. My images attempt to capture physical destruction through a heavy dose of black and color demonstrating a metaphorical parallel of the environmental destruction to the collective psychological trauma humans endure, along with a fatalistic inescapability from the future that lies ahead.

Lois Bielefeld

"Its Own Pristine Devices" is a series intentionally aestheticizing and trying to make magical landscapes within the “natural” spaces or islands that interstate freeways carve up with their entrance and exit ramps. I found myself wondering about these freeway islands that often are complex mini-habitats forgotten or un-appreciated spaces that serve as detention basins for precipitation and road/vehicle created pollution.

Matthew David Crowther

Faced with the anxiety of an uncertain ecological future I’ve turned to examining my relationship to life and death on the plot of land I live on. I’ve also been considering the interwoven relationships between science, art, and “magic” as means to understand and control the chaotic forces around them. Made within my home and yard in Chicago, these photographs document my attempts to deal with that anxiety through ritual, poetry, and science.

Nathan Rochefort

These images show areas impacted by natural disasters, land displaced by development projects, and spaces where the influence of the human hand is undeniable. Intrusive artificial light, mounds of earthen material destined to disappear or be redistributed, and flora controlled and cultivated by humans are featured prominently. They are meditations on an uncertain future and portend the coming changes. And in that sense, they are omens.

NicolÒ sertorio

This series is thus based on the idea that the current sense of disenfranchisement derives from the fundamental disconnect we have from the natural world and the social isolation that comes with it. In turn, the perception of the natural environment as something external drives our uses and abuses of environmental resources.

Scott Fortino

I made these pictures to express our contemporary moment: the anxiety, uncertainty, and unfathomable grief enervates our collective consciousness. On a personal level, movement can create anxiety for a photographer. I chose to embrace it and allow for uncertain outcomes in the process. These pictures are intended to elicit that same uncertainty while serving as metaphor for our shared helplessness in addressing climate change and the disappearance of the natural world.

Aindreas scholz

The psychological impact that news of environmental catastrophes has on mental health is a further growing and global concern which has already affected me deeply. Psychologists describe this phenomenon as ‘climate anxiety’, a general fear of helplessness when faced with environmental and ecological disaster. Through my cyanotypes, I hope to actively start a ‘ripple effect’ for change by creating thought-provoking work that engages all of us who are genuinely concerned about global and environmental issues.

Ana Leal

“Vanishing Forest” aims to draw attention to the fact that advancing degradation of The Amazon Rainforest is pushing the ecosystem to a point where it would lose its ability to function.Original photos taken in August 2019 at a 10-day boat expedition at the region, went through post production reaching intriguing new images.These constructed images represent a metaphor for an apocalyptic future where the Forest is not clear, it is worn out, lost.

Bar Faber

“Animal Kingdom”: By creating a reproduction from a series of wildlife animal photographs and distorting them using digital editing tools, some of them become almost unfamiliar and abstract. Thus becoming reminiscent of the “original” natural world.

Daniela Pafundi

The series investigates the tensions that arise from the relationship we have with the Earth. I consider photography as a ritual act, as a ceremony that is built over and over again by putting in action the symbolic. For this I compile and re-enact rituals from various communities, investigating my own connection with the Earth. I stage desire becoming act. I use the photographic medium to ritualize.

David Ondrik

These photographs are a synthesis of my emotional reaction to the accumulation of toxic waste, the poaching of animals, and uncontrolled wildfires.

Elizabeth Stone

Immiscible elements are bound to silver gelatin photographic paper creating topographic abstractions in the YOU ARE HERE project. This cameraless chemigram method uses sunlight and the interplay of chemistry. I physically sculpt the paper making peaks and valleys and waterways. I then surrender control in the process and allow the liquids to form their own living patterns. I am informed by my explorations of the Colorado Plateau. It is here that I feel the smallest.

Elizabeth Woodger

This series, Ramifications, is a metaphor for the detrimental effects that humans are having on the biosphere. The images are reproductions of chemilumen prints, which were created by the application of harmful chemicals to photographic paper during sunlight printing. Each chemilumen print is serendipitous, ephemeral and unique; much like nature itself. The voids represent destruction but they also represent potential. It was this balance between presence and absence that I wanted to explore with my work.

Ella Morton

These mordançage images are from my series “The Dissolving Landscape,” which feature altered analogue photographs of landscapes in Canada and Nordic Europe. My work asks the question: what are we losing, in terms of our spiritual connection to the land, as the climate rapidly changes? I consider myself a poetic activist, articulating the profundity of our relationship with the land, and the emotional complexity of its change and loss as global warming unfolds.

Eric Robertson

This is “Sequence 05 - Magnesium.” The abstract beauty is presented as painterly landscapes, yet closer inspection reveals the horror of this place, the most polluted Superfund site in the United States on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. The photographs are sublimated onto metal magnesium-strengthened metals sourced from this facility. The materiality implicates the artist and viewer in the complicated relationship we have with so many industrial processes.

Gary edward blum

Waiting. Longing. Openness. Horizons. This work predominantly revolves around memory of the landscape. Lines and shapes interrupt the ability to see them for what they represent: freedom. Images I had taken, that at the time I took for granted, now take on a meaning of new found reverence as we are all forced to watch cultures and lands fade away.

Gilberto gutierrez, Jr.

Living in Phoenix, Arizona, often riding by lawns flooded to allow non-native grasses to thrive as well as viewing the native species attempting to bear the heat of the desert. This work is the physical impression of the plant, while attempts to review its appearance while acknowledging that memory can fail us. Water develops the cyanotype, floats the emulsion, but ultimately can not revive the plants due to influx of non-native assimilations.

Giovanni de Benedetto

PREMATURE is the project name that embraces all the artworks made with the Augmented Klecksography Painting technique, and these photos are macro shots taken from the newest-so-far-unreleased PREMATURE artworks 2021. The submitted images seem photos taken from an aerial perspective, showing the gradual melting of the glaciers in Antarctica where the naked earth is discovered underneath the ice. The proportion scale is magnified, where 6cm of painting seems a huge portion of the earth.

Julianna Foster

Geographical Lore series consists of a combination of two-dimensional images like framed photographs, broadsides, light-boxes and three-dimensional objects such as cut and manipulated photographs and artist books. This work combines photographic images of both the natural world and hand-made, assembled environments. I experiment with ideas of abstraction and representation, manipulation, constructing/deconstructing images of these documented spaces/places, and explore how environments function and evolve, at times depicting a façade or fabricated reality that examines spatial relationships, scale shifts, and materiality/structure.

Kevin Hoth

Landscape photographs often contain what we construct as exterior to ourselves. The “vista” photograph, however, infers a possession of place via a singular vantage point. The views we have from our homes often rise out over land that is not ours. I know the vantage point in this particular image very well because it extends from my porch. The view is “mine” but the neighbor’s horse (long a symbol of the American West) and the land it stands on is not. The red lens filter is a nod to the smoke of forest fires that have often clogged my lungs and “my mountain view.” Like any species of manmade pollution, the unhealthy smoke of wildfires does not adhere to property lines. I bring the mountains to me via the instant film image I can hold in my hand. The intentional cut I make into the image mimics the line of the mountains beyond my reach. It is also a scar that negates the view and my possession of it.

Maria Rosario Montero

Landscape Impossibilities: Strategies to survive a lockup. The following series explores the artist's perceptions from the quarantines imposed in Chile (Santiago) during the COVID-19 pandemic. It seeks to make visible the limitations of confinement, where the inability to travel makes us inhabit a hyper-seen and felt daily gaze. You can no longer contemplate large spaces, snowy mountain ranges or mighty rivers. Our confinement, mediated by images that come through screens, only reveal the impossibility of experiencing that outside. In this confinement, that anchoring to the territory is blurred, and we don't longer inhabit our spaces and bodies. We live through the images that are produced before us. I cannot wonder, it is this the way we will perceived nature in the future?

Mary Zompetti

The cameraless photographs in the The Lost Garden series are created by exposing sheet film to environmental conditions over time. The remains of wildlife and other remnants of the natural world are placed on the film’s surface. Changing weather and the deteriorating effects of putrefying bodily fluids are recorded into the silver emulsion. Both delicate and resilient, the film surface acts an imprint of the fragile body and a map-like record of time and place.

Patricio saavedra

Anthropogenic Trace is a photographic research and creation project that is being carried out on the coastal edge of the central and northern coast of the sea, in which it is attempted to develop and explain phenomena in which man and industry have had effects on territories. Through photography, create a dialogue between the natural environment polluted by the mining industries and the native landscape. Landscapes disturbed by the environmental crisis that function as anthropogenic trace and bear witness to an infamous present and past that seeks to remain in latent silence. This anthropogenic effect not only points to the testimony of a devastating present, but also directs the gaze towards an apocalyptic and dystopian future. It is through this disruptive and aesthetic gesture of the manipulation of the chemical elements of each sector, that their photographs submerged and incubated under polluted waters of the sea provide a degree of abstraction due to the invisible alteration that also falls from the coastal and the intertidal zones ; where the earth ends and the sea begins, this poetic dialogue is generated which, as a deliberate act, reflects on our landscape and its coexistence with the human being.

Patrick Gookin

From “Constellation.”

Samin Ahmadzadeh

We live in a world with a variety of landscapes, each with their own challenges. Mountains, deserts, forests, rivers, the ocean; they’ve all had an influence on our lives. Our identities are firmly rooted in the differing landscapes we inhabit shaping our cultures and imaginations. This series aims to explore the profound relationship we’ve developed with our landscapes and the many ways we have learned to interact with and experience our surroundings across different cultures.

Sarah Crofts

Wild spaces in Red Hook, Brooklyn are disappearing. Fenced off and verdant, their loss illustrates the ongoing process of gentrification. Surrounded at home by constant demolition, I began making lumen prints in situ, contact printing black and white photo paper against newly erected construction barriers and old overgrown fences, rethinking documentary photography in terms of touch, trace and index. Fugitive or changed by stabilization, these prints echo the precarity of communities against inscrutable economic forces.

Shanna Merola

Dioxin, cadmium, arsenic, lead... what happens over time when the human body is exposed to these elements, and what happens to the land? Travelling to EPA designated Superfund sites I document the slow violence of deregulation. The photographs in We All Live Downwind examine the human cost of these extractive economies - across different decades and regions - from my own neighborhood on the Eastside of Detroit, to Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens, and Love Canal, NY.

Yuxin Guan

My photos are exploring the relationship between humans and nature. Each photo is constructed by the stock photo and human-made objects. By employing and transforming human-made objects, I use them to destroy the perfect natural appearances inside stock photos.

Featured Artists: Catalina Aranguren, Leah Dyjak, Lindsay M. Godin, Lois Bielefeld, Matthew David Crowther, Nathan Rochefort, Nicolò Sertorio, Scott Fortino, Aindreas Scholz, Ana Leal, Bar Faber, Daniela Pafundi, David Ondrik, Elizabeth Stone, Elizabeth Woodger, Ella Morton, Eric Robertson, Gary Edward Blum, Gilberto Gutierrez Jr., Giovanni De Benedetto, Julianna Foster, Kevin Hoth, Maria Rosario Montero, Mary Zompetti, Patricio Saavedra, Patrick Gookin, Samin Ahmadzadeh, Sarah Crofts, Shanna Merola, Yuxin Guan