I am super excited about beginning this MFA at the University of Regina, and I’m pumped about working with my supervisor, Risa Horowitz. I expect that the directed studio class I’m taking with her, Art and Climate Change, will challenge me in several useful ways. This is a class that will allow me to work with any medium I want to produce work that is on the issue that matters the most to me. Nothing could be better.

However, I’ve hit a road block, or at least a speed bump: I have no idea what to produce.

I never struggled like this to find an idea for a course project in any of the 11 senior undergrad visual arts classes I took over the past five years, and I am trying to figure out what’s causing this block.

I had a proposal in by my Sept 14^th deadline, but I’ve since decided not to go ahead with it. I’m going to take some space here to describe the proposal and what led me to realize that it wasn’t one worth following through with.  

The idea was for a two-part project.

In the first part, I was going to have a few sets of photo-text or photo-photo compilations. An example I for one of these was that I’d have photos from my childhood next to statements and questions about what happened in the last 40+ years that got us to this stage (acknowledging the feelings I have about what’s taken place in my lifetime). Another idea was to pair photos from my childhood with the CO2ppm that existed when they were taken (again, acknowledging that my lifetime has coincided with the period of the most intense ghg emissions, and that I am partially to blame). A third idea was to have photos from my childhood next to images from places in the world that are being devastated by climate change (to acknowledge the wrongness of the situation we’re in, where developed nations are causing the problem and developing nations, least at fault, are the ones suffering the brunt of the consequences).

What I believed I was intending to do with these pieces was to delve into my feelings of grief and guilt regarding my implicated in the climate crisis that we’re facing. I thought that this piece/series would offer me the chance to do some introspection and come to a deeper understanding of what climate change (and my role in it) means to me.

The second part of this proposed project was going to involve going out into the community where I live to interact with the public on the topic of climate change. I planned to use interactive graphs detailing atmospheric CO2 levels over the last millennia made available by The Two Degree Institute.

I believed that this project would give me the chance to have conversations with strangers about climate change and possibly challenge a few people’s perspectives.

Through working on the two parts of this project, I was hoping I’d arrive at a better understanding of “didactic art.” My understanding is that the term “didactic art” refers to art that has the sole purpose of teaching people something about how they should think or act regarding a particular issue. It can easily be patronizing and/or less impactful as art because of its singular focus on getting across a message. I can understand how such pieces could be “boring” (a word Risa used). I believed that this project’s two-part focus – firstly, turning inward and simply “reporting” on my own feelings about climate change, and secondly, turning outward expressly for the purpose of getting others to think about climate change — would be an opportunity for to test my understanding of “didactic art” and how/what type of art that is about climate change is/is not categorically “didactic.”

Rethinking things

Something about these ideas didn’t sit right with me, but I was determined to have a proposal submitted to Risa in the one-week deadline I was given, and I hoped I could turn these ideas into something suitable through the course of developing them over the semester.

Still, I was feeling an inordinate amount of anxiety over the prospect of talking about this proposal with Risa or anyone else. I was actually embarrassed by it, as though it was completely inappropriate or inadequate. I felt wrong about focusing on my own life and relationship to climate change in this way, but I wasn’t sure why. Was it just because I’m not used to making myself the subject of the work I’m creating, because I am too ignorant about the history and theory behind conceptual and performance art, or because I just didn’t have confidence that it was a worthwhile project to pursue? It may have been that all of these issues were what was causing me this anxiety and hesitation.   

Chatting with Risa during our schedule meeting on Monday September 14^th, it was clear she wanted to demonstrate a few issues with the project that I’d have to overcome. I don’t believe that she wanted me to drop the proposal, but she raised several difficult questions about it, including:

What is the central issue of this work – is it the art, or is art am I using art as a utilitarian way to do something else?

Could I find a way to speak to people about climate change that doesn’t rely on the trope of melting glaciers – a trope that’s been used a lot, and one that people in Saskatchewan may not identify with?

Have I considered that using images from developing nations may give off the impression that I’m unaware of the exploitative colonialist impression they may convey?  

I was deeply uncomfortable during this meeting, and while she ended it by saying “the proposal is great,” I nonetheless was left feeling like there was something very wrong with it.

I started looking at my childhood photos and testing out what the photo compilations for the first part of my proposal would look like.

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I wasn’t happy with the results of this test. It was not saying what I wanted it to say, and it was not appealing to look at either.

A full stop.

Friday came, and in that week’s Group Studio class with David Garneau, I presented on three artists whose practice I wish to emulate. I chose Joseph Michael, Ken Lum, and Eve S. Mosher. I talked about how these artists were doing things with their practice and/or using media in a way that I admired.

Eva S. Mosher’s practice in particular is one I admire. She seems to have found a way to merge her activism and her art in a way that is poignant and not preachy.

“My work utilizes art and performance to increase knowledge and understanding around environmental and social issues. My goal with each project is to create a space for participants to have a shared experience from which they learn and continue to share beyond the scope of the initial project.”

Eve S. Mosher

One of her projects, Highwaterline, involved drawing a thick chalk line over 70 miles in New York City and later 36 miles in Bristol, England. The idea is brilliant – it succinctly visualizes the predicted effects of climate change if we do too little to mitigate the situation. It’s obvious to anyone that this visualization represents a problem: the world’s ice is melting; seawater levels are rising; people who live near the coast are going to be fucked. At the same time, the chalk line is visually interesting. I also don’t see this work as being “in your face” didactic. On the contrary, through this performance, Mosher was able to start conversations about climate change in a very matter-of-fact way: this line represents where water will rise to in this city; take from this information what you wish; do something positive with it if you want to.

What a succinct message, and what a novel way to convey it!

This is the type of work I’d like to produce, and I realized after sharing it in the Group Studio that my proposed project would be about as far from being this successful as we are here in Regina from an ocean.

Having so many concerns about my proposal, and knowing that David has created work that deals with political issues, I asked him if we could chat after class, and he agreed. I described my proposal to him and my hesitations about it. We only had a few minutes, so he cut to the chase by asking me a few very direct questions: 

Wouldn’t my childhood photo-text pieces imply that I feel I’ve been victimized?

My answer at first: no.

My answer after thinking about it for another moment: yes.

The truth is – As a child, I didn’t know what climate change was. I didn’t know that I was contributing to global greenhouse gas emissions. I didn’t know that people weren’t doing anything about the situation. Ergo, I can’t hold myself responsible for what I did as a child. Perhaps what I really wanted to say with these proposed photo-text works was: people have fucked up, the whole entire system is fucked up, and it was this way long before I was born.

David also asked me what it was I thought made Mosher’s work successful. I told him what I’ve described above: that it is straightforward and unambiguous. Was my project this simple? No.

And so that was it for this project for me.

Funny, but a few days after speaking with David and deciding to come up with a new project, I see this on my Facebook feed:

It seems that Greta has also been thinking the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere since she was born.

Perhaps I’ll return to the idea of using my childhood photos in my work somehow, but for now I’m going shelve that idea, do some more reading, talk to a few people, answer a few more questions, give some serious thought to what it is I want to say and how I can best say it, and aim for a fresh start.