For my second semester as an MFA student at the U of R, I’m once again taking a Group Studio course — a class students need to take at least four times throughout their degree. The course objectives are as follows:

The MFA Group Studio is a seminar focused on studio work, research, writing, presentation and professional practice. Through group discussions, studio visits, gallery visits and field trips seminar participants will practice critical engagement and build collegiality in the university community and beyond. (from the syllabus)

This term, Holly Fay is teaching the course, and I stand to learn a lot. Her own work deals with “natural systems, phenomenology, ideas of place, and has addressed anthropocentric representation of nature in the tradition of Western landscape art” (“about”). In fact, in one of her recent projects, Floating Series, she is exploring how in nature, “patterns of structure that are self similar can be observed over a wide range of scales” (Floating Series), such as patters seen in both clouds and water molecules. This is someone I have to get to know! I hope to learn more about her practice as the term goes on.

One of the assignments she’s having us do for this class is called the “Arts & Culture Events Journal.” For it, we need to write a reflective text on four such events.

Last night, thanks to Holly alerting me to it, I watched the Dunlop Gallery’s live-streamed “Opening Remarks and Artist Talk” for their States of Collapse exhibit.

OMG, it was amazing. This was the first online presentation that I actually did NOT multitask once throughout. I hung on every word the presenters spoke, transcribing them for my future reference (I don’t trust my memory). Here’s my response to this event.

The three artists who spoke last night are each doing work that amazes me. Jude Griebel, Jill Ho-You, and Sylvia Ziemann. I want to talk with them. I want to go out for coffee with them. This can’t happen. I also want to thank them — for the work they’re doing, and also for what I’ve learned from them. Through listening to them talk, I reached a deeper level of understanding something about my own art practice: that it’s okay to portray “states of collapse.” It’s okay to show the anticipated effects of catastrophic climate change. It’s alright to include melting glaciers, for example. I don’t mean this in terms of being given an “okay” to keep reproducing tired tropes, but inasmuch as my concerns about depicting the “doom and gloom” of the situation and how doing so may actually turn people further away from taking any type of personal (or political) action. One of my concerns has been how to implement what I’ve read in a few studies about the psychology of viewing images of climate change — how images showing “the solutions” nudge more people towards becoming invested in those solutions, whereas images showing emaciated polar bears just make people sad. These three artists don’t seem to worry about such studies, at least not from what they said. They are creating the work they feel they need to create, and they know it will stand to impact its viewers in a positive way. Ho-You put this so well when answering the question “what are the ways that you’re hopeful about the state of the world?”

Really great question, and other people have asked me about that because my work is very somber and clinical, and for me a part of the function of showing these speculative images is we’re sensory animals, we’re logical too, but we respond to images because we’re so visual. I think there is some usefulness in making these cataclysmic images because it speaks to a different part of our psychology than lists of statistics. If you think about warming in the arctic and polar bears, someone would tell you that and you’d know it logically, but as soon as you see the image of the emaciated polar bear swimming, it hits you on a more bodily level, so I’d like to think that my work opens up a space where people can start to imagine – what would be left, what would it look like, if all life on earth was gone? What would happen to our cities/infrastructure. Despite some of the images, I am very hopeful. They’re not created out of despair for me, though certainly people are in their right to feel anxious and despair and think “this could be the worst thing that could happen, so now that we’ve imagined that, that’s like, now we know we don’t want that, so what are the actions we need to take?”

Ho-You, Jill. “States of Collapse — Opening Remarks and Artist Talk” YouTube Livestreamed event, Dunlop Art Gallery, January 26 2021.

(this reminds me of Quarmly’s account of seeing art work about a polar bear in Watermelon Snow — I mention this in my post about that book).

The work Ho-You shared at this event is an installation titled Inversion comprising a series of petri dishes with images of industrial life etched into a medium that bacteria and mold eats away over time. They are a synecdoche — the micro-climates inside each dish contain a process of consumption and then death (when the food, in this case the medium, runs out) that mimics what is happening all around us — what Ho-You (and scientists) believe may ultimately take place with our species. In the end, she says, the world may belong to bacteria and mold once again.

Gob-shockingly brilliant idea.

Jude Griebel’s work has a much more playful quality to it, and yet the messages in the work are just as dire. He says he uses a lot of humor in the intricate miniatures he creates to help viewers “navigate the larger things happening in them.” Another way he words this is by saying that his work “provides an access point for a diverse public to confront issues.” So, so important.

Sylvia Ziemann takes this strategic use of humour even farther in her work. In her recent work, she’s created dioramas where animal/human figures go about their daily business. She says that “if kids and old people can’t appreciate my work, then I’m not communicating property.” At the same time, the work is as much about impending apocalypse as the work of the other artists who spoke: “I have a doomsday clock in the rabbit room. It’s at 20 seconds to midnight.”

I’m not able to find the image of this work that we saw during her talk, but I she’s done other work with dioramas and puppets on similar themes, such as for Carnival at the End of the World:

and Game of Chance:

The work and words of all three of these artists are incredibly inspiring to me. I’m going to stop worrying about not making pieces that include solar panels. I’m going to keep considering how to incorporate humour into my work (I’m waiting to receive The Artist’s Joke, thanks to Risa). I’m so grateful to have been able to attend/watch this event. I’ll end this post with the words of Cindy Baker, the event’s moderator:

We can’t yet fathom whatever will become our ultimate undoing; all the calamities we know about seem way too easy because we have imagined them. They end neatly, with a conclusion that we feel some resolution from. Contemporary artists though don’t wrap things up with neat bows; we ask questions, etc. We refuse resolution. We play an important role in an uncertain world. The artists in this exhibit are creating the unfathomable right now.

Baker, Cindy. “States of Collapse — Opening Remarks and Artist Talk” YouTube Livestreamed event, Dunlop Art Gallery, January 26 2021.