Expedition by Mary Mattingly.
“If the bath water got only half a degree warmer every hour, we would never know when to scream.” -Bertrand Russell
When Barbi Reed, owner of Anne Reed Gallery and Muffet Jones, Gallery Director, attended Art Basel Miami they came across something entirely new: almost every artist there was creating art that dealt with the environment. Both Reed and Jones admit to being surprised. As Jones elaborates, “while artists have always been on the cutting edge of ideas and social issues, the focus on the environment is fairly new.” In Miami, Reed says, the emphasis on the environment was “blatant”.
Reed and Jones believe the plethora of environmentally conscious art is mostly due to awareness of global warming becoming more and more mainstream. Just last week, Sun Valley hosted its first ever Green Your Scene Symposium. “It is no longer extremely liberal or whacky to worry about it,” Reed says. “Global warming has become so accepted by scientists and politicians on both sides of the spectrum.”
While artists have dealt with the environment before, it has never been so pervasive with work after work expressing everything from concern to horror about the state of the natural world. This collective movement is quite normal in the art world. Reed explains, “artists often jump on the bandwagon. After all Picasso followed Matisse and Picasso used to make sculptures out of trash.”
The two returned from Miami intellectually exhausted. There were so many artists engaging the idea of sustainability and environmental destruction from all different angles and in all different mediums, Jones and Reed thought they could do twelve exhibits on the subject alone. They chose to start with one, “Engaging Dystopia.”
“Engaging Dystopia” features a number of artists who deal with the issue of global warming and its consequences. All of the artists use beautiful images that are thought provoking but not didactic. “The attitude and the issues come out in the layers of the piece, not just right in your face,” explains Jones. For instance, photographer Andrew Moore presents a photograph of a river in China strewn with plastic bags. It is at once absolutely horrifying and absolutely gorgeous.
There are also mesmerizing pieces by Mary Mattingly. Mattingly creates images that explore the world of the future, one in which the ice caps have melted and land is scarce. She begins her project by creating clothing that works to protect an individual from the elements; so, rather than having a home, one carries his or her “habitat” on his or her back, much like a snail. She then dresses her subjects in her handmade garments and photographs them in or near the water. The photograph is then digitally altered to create an even more extreme environment, which in turn imagines a world where we become like explorers and nomads, where anyone and everyone is fighting for survival and has become a political refugee. While the world has not ended, it is a new and foreign landscape, one that displaces people and homes and communities. Needless to say her art is as intense as it is beautiful.
To learn more about art and the environment, take a tour with Muffet Jones at the Anne Reed Gallery on Wednesday, March 19 at 4:30pm. You will see work by Mattingly as well as Mathias Kessler, a photographer who takes stunning pictures of ephemeral objects like ice caps and glaciers in Greenland, and Joshua Jensen-Nagle, another photographer who focuses on exotic creatures and their potential, if not inevitable, extinction. “Engaging Dystopia” runs from March 14 through May 20, 2008.
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