BmoreArt

The works together illuminated what is likely a familiar problem for climate activists and scientists—the abstraction of an existential threat to those living in the imperial core. The show, simply titled Inaugural Exhibit (September 6-22, 2024), addressed this nature in the exhibition text.

Describing climate change as a “hyperobject”—as coined by philosopher Timothy Morton—the issue affects humanity on such an overwhelmingly large scale it is difficult to comprehend, creating a cognitive dissonance between the knowledge of this existential threat, and the necessity to continue everyday life. For many, this dissonance creates a gnawing cynicism that is probably familiar. While this is a flavor of ennui that seems to exist in the zeitgeist, the show focused more on the material, with each of its ten artists going a different route, and the work of Cazabon and Scheiber being the most gut punching. 

This emotionally affecting nature was not absent in the rest of the show, however. Many of the artists played a delicate dance between showing and not telling, and the background existential resonance of their respective works offered a departure from old and well-worn criticisms of “activist artwork.” Instead, The Crow’s Nest’s Inaugural Exhibition featured work that fit into an educational framework as well as mediations of beauty tinged with despair. 

In Hugh Pocock’s textbook illustration of a public park designed to exclude humans and rewild an area, we see shades of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, exemplifying an often identified criticism of climate work and its relationship with the slippery slope towards what has been described as eco-fascism. This is often where it can lose people outside of the academy—the natural world must be preserved, but human will still exists—framed within who has access to that natural world and who must use it to participate in our capitalist society. This common issue is perhaps an unintentional backdrop to Pocock’s piece, in which the rewilding of natural habitat is necessary to maintain our environment, a core element of human life. 

In the twisting collage of the work of Jordan Tierney, we see the stark beauty of our human-created refuse intermingling with our natural world. Tierney’s work is often a process of long walks through creeks with her dogs, and fashioning many found objects together with the briny driftwood. Within Tierney’s beauty is also violence however, with the work “Man is part of nature, and this war against nature is inevitably a war against himself—Rachel Carson (1907-1964 scientist, writer, activist)” resembling a battlefield melee made out of driftwood.

Recalling Mad Max’s resource wars and the post-apocalyptic media obsession of the 2010’s, the work has a timelier relevance when taken in context of How To Blow Up A Pipeline, or Kim Stanely Robinson’s sci fi book The Ministry for the Future, which sets some progress with the slowing of climate change with the sabotage of industry that has imbedded itself as its biggest culprit. 

Sookkyung Park’s intricate wave forms of folded paper, “Wave III” and “Wave V” carry their own form of violence. The paper, folded into many sharp and accordion-like shapes, holds a delicate danger, not unlike water itself—a precious necessity that brings joy as well as a destructive force of nature.

Se Jong Cho’s paintings were thematically perfect for this show and rendered in her exquisite, stylized precision that’s a reflection of her background as a scientist, comes from her Extraction series. “Coal Terminal” and “Arctic Oil Rig” depict floating landscapes as tiles suspended and perforated by tubes of color representing their respective fossil fuels. A running motif in Cho’s work, the floating tiles illustrate just how delicate the environments from which they were extracted are. 

Phaan Howng’s orchid paintings, showing the evolution of orchids to adapt to climate change “in defense of humans,” presented a vision of progress not without hope, in line with the “rewilding” idea in Pocock’s work, though with a more theatrical take. In speculative fiction, such as the work of Margaret Atwood or Octavia Butler, we see this—hope in the form of life that has adapted despite the damage inflicted by climate change. 

Notably, one of the few works in the first exhibition that centered the human figure was that of Piotr Szyhalski. “Voices” depicts the figure of a woman speaking to a pond of fish, mirrored by a captain of industry spewing clouds of smoke, shown in four seemingly identical black and white prints. Anyone who got sucked into social media’s long stressful days of nothing in 2020 will recognize this work (on Instagram under the handle @laborcamp), as Szyhalski’s speedily made compositions seemed to keep up with the dialogue of the zeitgeist, created in an almost agitprop format recalling WPA era posters, Soviet propaganda, Rockwell Kent, and graphic novelist Charles Burns. 

A more mysterious and Silent Spring laden departure from “greetings from an anarchist jurisdiction,” the repetitive nature of “Voices” exemplifies the circuitous nature of these issues, and the artist’s latent desire to go big, as viewers might recall the full mural of Labor Camp work at Baltimore’s own good neighbor coffee shop.

Seeing this work in the show oddly sent it home. During the inaccurately titled “lockdown era” of the pandemic, the beauty and stillness of spring’s slow time dilated, unfolding in the first few months of the pandemic, showed many the true rhythm of nature we might have missed in everyday life—a beauty that can radicalize someone against its complicit destruction. Szyhalski’s work became such a hallmark of this feeling, a distillation of hope and motivational exorcising of paralyzing dread, that will be the needed factor in our collective struggle against climate catastrophe. 

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Inaugural Exhibit (now closed) featured the work of Lynn Cazabon, Rosemary Feit Covey, Se Jong Cho, Phaan Howng, Alexander Heilner, Sookkyung Park, Hugh Pocock, Alexi Scheiber, Piotr Szyhalski, and Jordan Tierney.

Be sure to check out the current exhibition at Crow’s Nest, The Ecology of Freedom: Visual Activism Broadsides (photos below). Up through November 9th, it is a juried show created in collaboration with Patricia Watts from ecoartspace, and features the work of Mark Armbruster, Lynn Benson, Christina Bertea, Mazerick Betko, Pamela Casper, Nicole Dextras, Environmental Performance Agency (EPA), Holly Fay, Carol Flueckiger, Helen Glazer, Lawrence Gipe, Karen Hackenberg, Katie Kehoe, Deborah Kennedy, Pierre Leichner, Taina Litwak, Minal Mistry, Constance Old, Hugh Pocock, Jill Price, Jatun Risba, Jann Rosen-Queralt, Ruth Wallen, and Bart Woodstrup.

On November 12, the show will feature an artist talk with graphic novelist Eddie Ahn and is currently offering free takeaway posters!