Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.
- Chief Seattle, Duwamish
Physical, spiritual and ecological themes from our natural world, and their implicit interconnectedness, have been rooted in ancient and Indigenous philosophies for centuries. Contemporary ecological beliefs hinge on this idea.
To further illustrate this concept, All Our Relations is an Indigenous prayer of oneness (Mitákuye Oyás’i? in the Lakota language), seeking to live in kinship with nature, in harmony with all forms of life: animals, birds, insects, trees and plants, rocks, rivers, mountains and valleys, and human beings. Zoroastrianism, widespread in Iran and Central Asia in the 6th century BC, through caring for the elements and the earth, sees the physical world as a natural matrix of Seven Creations: Fire, Sky, Water, Earth, Animals, Humans and Plants. Purity of nature, in their tradition, is seen as the greatest good. Similarly, other ancient philosophies are concurrent with self-identification of being “at one” with nature and natural phenomena. They lead to ecocentrism and a holistic ecological attitude of “respect for nature.”
Re-Connections: In Kinship With Nature blends artistic expression with environmental activism. The artists address the urgent need to live more responsibly within the Earth’s finite resources. Witness to floods, rising waters and other man-made threats, they imagine a future where we live in harmony with nature and feel an obligation to work together to take action and reverse this trend.
This in-person exhibition will be hosted November 2023 to mid January 2024 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams - all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.
- David Abram, cultural ecologist and philosopher
Oceans Rising
Oil on canvas. 60 × 48 inches (2016/17)
Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates, 1992
Natural Man
Archival pigment prints and walnut frame structure. 23 4/5 x 36 7/10 inches - Edition 1 of 3 (2021)
Many Hands Petroglyph
Chromogenic print. Framed dimensions: 40 15/16 x 50 15/16 x 1 7/8 inches (Bears Ears National Monument, Utah, 2018)
Lewis Lake WY 3
Chromogenic print soaked in Lewis Lake water. 72 x 105 inches (2013)
Bridges Over Flint
24 silver gelatin prints developed with Flint, Michigan tap water, vitamin C, bleach, and wine. 24,8 x 10 inches each (2016)
Oil Bunkering # 9
Chromogenic color print. 48 × 64 inches (Niger Delta, Nigeria, Africa, 2016)
I wish my artwork could persuade millions of people to join a global conversation about sustainability. - Edward Burtynsky
Soup: 500+
(Ingredients: representing more than 500 pieces of marine plastic debris found in the stomach of an Albatross chick). 100 x 73 cm. Edition 2/12 +2 AP
By bringing attention to marine plastic pollution, it is hoped my work will help inform, and raise awareness about this issue of climate change. - Mandy Barker
Antworks
Pigment print. 30 x 30 inches (2020)
Hverar?nd #3
Archival pigment print. 20 x 30 inches (Iceland, 2013)
Paul First Nation: 2005 Wabamum Clean Up Site of a 700,000 Litre Oil Spill
Digital print on rag paper, 32 X 23 inches. Collection of the artist (2011)
Driftpile First Nation: Driftpile River from Swan Hills
Digital print on rag paper, 32 X 23 inches. Collection of the artist (2011)
Excerpt from the poetics & politics of scarred/sacred water Ellis, J. (Ed.). (2018). Water Rites: Reimagining Water in the West. Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press.
Season's End
Painting stretcher, wire, foil, paper, glue, canvas, thread, wood molding, gold leaf, plastic. 51 x 80 x 20 inches (2011)
Outdoor Drawing
Hand-coated Cyanotype print on Platine paper. Each print: 40 x 30 inches, walnut frame (Governors Island: East & West, 2021)
Sizibeni
Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist, Yancey Richardson, New York, and Stevenson Cape Town/Johannesburg (West Point, North Carolina, 2017)
Euclidean Gris Gris (The Young Shall Inherit the Earth)
Three archival pigment prints in artist's frames, 30 3/4 x 30 5/8 x 3 1/4 inches (2019)
Geopolitics of Soil
Voyage of Acceptance
Single Channel HD video with sound. Running time 9:48min.
Hot Needle #1 (Blue)
A polyethylene particle approx. 1.6mm pinned on heat colored needle.
For a Week Without Speaking
Chromogenic dye coupler print. 40 × 40 inches (2012)
Submerged Forest, Rond?nia, 2020
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Subterranean Fire, Pantanal, 2020
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
American Mine (Carlin Nevada 1), 2007
Archival pigment print, 48 x 48 inches
Desolation Desert, Tailings Pond 1, 2018
Minera Centinela Copper Mine, Antofagasta Region, Atacama Desert, Chile. Archival pigment print, 48 x 48 inches
As citizens of an entrenched consumer society, we are collectively complicit in the creation of these depleted and damaged landscapes. - David Maisel
Harmony As A Hive (Performance Still)
Archival print. 30 x 40 inches (2010)
Forces of Change, 2017
Oil and acrylic on wood panel. 72 x 144 inches
Bitter Water
Archival pigment print (dibond). 70 x 70 cm. Edition of 3 with 2 AP (Limpopo, border between South Africa and Zimbabwe, 2017)
Photographing the Limpopo from Beit Bridge made me consider the colonial control of ideological space, which has had such a direct influence on how people have been classified and imagined. Bitter Water is a series of photographs of seven South African rivers, as boundaries or borders, photographed over a period of two months in varying weather patterns. The abstraction of water, without any land features or visible marks, is an allegory of a border of historical and ideological imagination. Rivers became easy markers of imagined land division during colonial occupation. The seven rivers stand as boundary symbols and borders of the actualization of imagined and ideological space. - Garth Meyer
Gratitude Code Root Mural
Felt tip marker and acrylic on sapling roots and plywood, approx. 114 x 48 inches (2009)
Ogony Boy
From the Oil Rich Niger Delta series. C-print (2007)
I want to put a human face on this paradise lost, in order to provoke a feeling and trigger a deep sense of change within the observer.
- George Osodi
The Freshmaker
Ink and junk mail on paper. 15 x 19 inches (2017)
Kamilo
100% ocean plastic debris. 60 x 48 x 36 inches (2011)
S.O.S. Pledge
Aquatic Larvae
Welded steel and single use plastic debris, each approximately 33 X 13 X 8 inches (2020)
The Bukhara Deer
Archival pigment print. 27 x 40 inches (2011)
Power of Tajá
Print on fine art paper. 51 1/5 × 39 2/5 × 1 1/5 inches. Editions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of 5 + 2AP (2020)
41.3504 N, 72.4052 W
Digital print on painted mylar. 25 x 17 inches framed (Essex, CT, 2019)
40.9503 N, 72.4052 W
25 x 17 inches framed (Lake Hopatcong, NJ, 2019)
Oyster Reef
Infrared chromogenic print, 30 x 40 inches mounted on plexiglass (2022)
*Billion Oyster Project aims to restore one billion live oysters to New York harbor by 2035, using discarded shells that provide homes for larvae that are placed in artificial reef structures in the harbor.
"The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy...to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up. "The ecological thought"...is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise." (Morton, 2012, The Ecological Thought).
This exhibit was launched in April 2022