The
beauty of the world we live in has long inspired photographers. Many have
sought to bring that majesty to our attention in hopes that we would manage
and care for our environment with the respect that it deserves. Take for
example, the outstanding conservational achievements of photographer Robert
Glenn Ketchum, and those of Ansel Adams, who, aside from being one of the
most well known photographers of the century, served on the board of
directors at the Sierra Club for over 35 years. Their breathtaking images
raised enough awareness about place to help protect and preserve many
natural treasures. The artists featured in Managing Eden share
similar concerns but unlike those who choose to show us the beauty, they
show us our impact within the natural world at a time when our own actions
have brought upon global warming, pollution of air, water, land, and
soil, animal extinction, and over-development that threatens the very
resources that make life on earth sustainable. Ranging from commercial and
societal action to personal connections, these image-makers shed light and
understanding on the complexity of our relationships, interventions, and
connections within our environment.
The title of the show was inspired by Joann
Brennan’s project Managing Eden. Brennan
investigates the many sides of habitat management, scientific
experimentation, conservation research, and the debate between intervention
and wildness. She questions generalized assumptions … “is the hunter a
villain? is the biologist a saint?” and poses questions many are afraid to
ask – the answers themselves are often still unresolved and fall
precariously between lines of science and morality. Rather than attempting
to simplify the issues, she embraces their complexity and opens new doorways
to a deeper understanding of just how involved we already are and how much
is at stake.
Like Joann Brennan, other artists look at
how we attempt to control and contain nature. Derek Johnston’s
project, Landscape Specimens, an installation of bottled pristine
landscapes, plays with ideas of how we attempt to preserve nature through
containment and commodification, addressing our fragmented relationship to
it. Johnston asks us to consider the constructed nature of many of our
national parks with their sweeping vistas and the bottled nature of what we
expect as the American Landscape. His work addresses his own impulses as a
photographer of landscape and searchs for something beyond what is promoted
as the perfect place for a hike, mountain bike ride, or camping trip. Dana
Fritz writes of her inspiration for Garden Views: The Culture of
Nature: In both Eastern and Western traditions the practice of
gardening reveals simultaneously our distance from and longing for “the
natural”. Fritz’s work, while focusing on meticulously cared for and
preserved gardens, opens a broader dialogue about both creative engagements
with nature, as well as our desire to impose order to the natural world as
it exists within our personal and public spaces. In contrast to Johnston and
Fritz who examine how we impose order on the natural world, Lori Nix’s
work reminds us of the awe-inspiring power the natural world holds.
Inherent in her toy filled constructions of natural disasters is the
ironic idea that we can wage control over natural elements – when of
course, we have no such power. Nix’s images remind us that it is humans
who are subject to the whims, order, and patterns of nature.
Addressing societal and industrial involvement in the environment, David Maisel, Tim Butler, and Cynthia Greig examine the resulting footprints following the exploration or alterations of Earth’s natural resources.
In David Maisel’s work, we are shown what was “left behind” through his aerial Black Maps, which depict bacterial blooms in Owens Lake, California. This lake was drained to supply water to the inhabitants of Los Angeles in the first quarter of the 20th century. Maisel’s images offer us both a literal and psychological portrait of the landscape as ravaged and scarred yet strangely seductive, and a glimpse of the world as created through our own actions. In the multi-media work of Tim Butler, those who once benefited from such activities as mineral mining are asked to consider the repercussions and its detrimental effects on their own community. From immediate tactile interaction with natural and found elements such as coal, acid drainage samples, iron, and soil itself, to candid interviews with community residents, Butler searches for a sense of environmental stewardship among the American mainstream. Using the archetypical fruit of Eden – the apple – Cynthia Greig weighs the impact of genetic mutation – both natural or manufactured – and now that we’ve actually gone so far as to alter the genetic structure of our food crop, will we know the difference? She asks the viewer to consider how genetic engineering is changing the face of the natural world and the food we consume, as well as its impact upon the future of the human species.
Both
Deborah Edmeades and Dornith Doherty approach the natural world from a more
personal sense of balance and interconnection. In her video piece, Deborah
Edmeades offers a meditation on the relationship between humans and
nature. As she sits within a wooded area, Edmeades creates sounds, which
merge with that of her surroundings. Her gestures of containment within the
frame seem to embody all that we hear and the result is an opportunity to
consider our own balance and impact on the world in which we live.
Navigating the border between nature and artifice, Dornith Doherty
merges art and science to investigate the cycles, rhythms, and transitory
nature of life, and our own interwoven connections and temporal existence.
She writes: Rather than approach
these managed natural spaces from a documentary perspective, these
constructed photographs employ a personal, expressive stance to explore the
anxiety inherent in contemporary culture as we confront new scientific
possibilities manipulating our environment.
The
concerns presented in Managing Eden ask us to consider our own agency
and relationships. If we were to think on Greig’s apples as a metaphor,
have we taken the bite that will expel us from the proverbial Garden of
Eden? In our questionable “mastery” of our environment, have our actions
set us on a path whose course will result in our own demise – either
through the depletion of Eden’s treasures or the transformation of it into
an inhospitable environment?
- Kate Menconeri & Ariel Shanberg, 2003
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