Climarte: addressing climate change through art

Volume 11 Number 3 March 9 - April 12 2015

Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River, Wyoming, 1942
Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River, Wyoming, 1942

 

Joanna Bosse, curator at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne introduces a new exhibition on show from 31 March to 5 July as part of Climarte Festival which explores the role art can play in creating a safer climate.

Climate change and its effect on the world’s many ecosystems is arguably today’s greatest collective challenge. No longer in the singular domain of the scientist or environmentalist, we are each, to a greater or lesser extent, implicated in the impacts of climatic changes. 

As we begin to accept responsibility for our role in the era of the recently defined ‘anthropocene’ it is more valuable to shift the focus positively towards meaningful human values than to advocate for modest changes to established behaviour. 

Art has the unique capacity to stimulate individuals both intellectually and emotionally, and to engender the personal and collective revelation needed in the face of overwhelming statistics, news reports and political discourse. As we grapple with our increasingly forlorn and conflicted relationship to nature, art offers enlightening experiences that have the potential to re-energise and re-orientate our relationship to the natural world. 

Featuring Australian and international artists who engage with poetic and philosophical concerns around the subject of nature, Nature/Revelation focuses on the language of the sublime in contemporary practice to explore this potential. 

The sublime in art was established in popular consciousness in the 18th century by Romantic landscape painters in Europe, and has been associated with a thrilling, emotional reaction in viewers that is aligned with a quasi-spiritual experience connecting the self to a larger system of creation forces.

Among the many mesmerising photographs Ansel Adams took in the Californian wilderness, those of King’s Canyon were instrumental in the late 1930s campaign to have this vast site designated a national park. 

The power of Adam’s images is the combination of pictorial truth and an unyielding commitment to capture the emotional reality of the humbling exaltation of the wilderness. 

Jonathan Delafield Cook’s life-size depiction of a 12-metre Sperm Whale has a similarly fantastical quality while being faithful to actuality. The scarred skin of this magnificent mammal is conveyed in detail and shows the marks of an environment that lies beyond our own experience, but is not exempt from degradation or environmental change. Encountering this leviathan eye-to-eye, we cannot escape the poignancy of the moment.

Gabriel Orozco’s deceptively simple video sits in contrast to the majestic panoramas of Adams and Delafield Cook, and introduces the intimacy of sensation. The artist turns a river pebble over in his hand, again and again, smoothing and polishing its surface. With this simple gesture, his hand takes the place of the rushing water that has eroded the sharp edges of the fragment for centuries. 

Susan Jacobs and Andrew Hazewinkel’s collaborative projection is an abstracted depiction of sunlight passing through a lens made of ice, and suggestive of a pure world of light and beauty prior to human evolution.

Seeming like relics, each of Jamie North’s sculptures is a living microcosm. Their apocalyptic ambience is undermined by the life system each structure supports, and North reminds us that even in the most inhospitable places life, growth and evolution prevail. 

As does beauty – the three Moons photographs by Mel O’Callahan glow with the shimmering iridescence of the moon’s lunar surface. But what is this natural phenomenon? O’Callahan’s work tends toward a revised conception of the so-called natural by investing an artificially constructed form with a pure and magical quality. 

David Haines’s two-screen video projection and Berndnaut Smilde’s photographs feature the elemental as protagonists. For Haines, two contrasting environments threaten to consume the individual without a trace in Day & Night (2005), whereas it is the cloud itself that is captured and controlled by Smilde in his striking Nimbus series.

Nature/Revelation will be on display 31 March to 5 July. The exhibition forms a key component of the ‘Art+climate=change’ festival presented by Climarte: arts for a safer climate. This festival of climate change-related arts and ideas includes curated exhibitions at a number of museums and galleries alongside a series of keynote lectures and forums featuring local and international speakers.

The University of Melbourne, with the Potter as project leader, is the Principal Knowledge Partner of the Climarte program.

Other divisions of the University contributing to the Festival include: the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, the Australian-German College of Climate & Energy Transitions, the Carlton Connect Initiative, the Centre for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, the EU Centre on Shared Complex Challenges, Melbourne School of Design, the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, and the Victorian Eco Innovation Lab.

 

www.climarte.org.