Maya Lin's Last Monument

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What is Missing is Maya Lin's self proclaimed last monument. If you have walked the slight grade of the Vietnam Memorial and felt the slow rise of the names in black stone, then you know the feeling she is after with this monument. In this instance, it is the slow disappearance of species after species, habitat after habitat, that our mindless human activities is erasing from the planet. The non-traditional memorial take form in many ways, including digitally. Check out Lin's website on the project. Haunting.

Eco Drawing Brings You Full Circle

Circular Painting from Fly on the Wall on Vimeo.

Groups like the Barn Stormers have made a name for themselves with time lapse drawing. This project was done on a circular wall and filmed with a rotating camera. Having done a smaller project like this I appreciate the effort and love its blend of good aggressive drawing, voice overs, great filming, and cool music.

I found this video on the Doodlers Anonymous blog.

Our Daily Bread

Official Website for Our Daily Bread

Director Nikolaus Geyrhalter has made a film that is as cool and unblinking as the machine that is our industrial food production industry. Cute little chicks are seen moving on conveyor belts like so many soda bottles, pigs legs are lobbed off and intestines separated by bored, machine like workers. Devoid of dialogue the films moves from one scene to the next engrossing as it is gross. In some ways this film shows just how natural our abuse of the natural world is; actions taken without remorse, just one life form feeding on another. Whether we fit into the web of life is another question. Watch this for a window into a world that ends on all our plates.

This excerpt starts out slow but stick with it. You will be surprised at what emerges from this sterile lab-like room. More excerpts are available on You Tube.

Prix Pictet Contest Winners- Photos on Global Water Crisis

Photo by Roman Signer

Check out this powerful video that shows the winning photos from the new sustainability photography award:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7701187.stm

Fresh, Wild Eyes

Catherine Chalmers creates fresh, insightful, sometimes disturbing and always beautiful images of animal life. I saw her installation Safari at a recent show title "In and Around the Garden" at the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, NC. This video enraptured myself and those around me as we traveled along at a bug's eye level with creatures like salamanders, spiders, roaches, flies, and frogs. Better than any National Geographic Special from my childhood, I was transported into a wild world so foreign yet filled with such "familiar" characters. Reading the documentation on the exhibit I discovered that all the scenes were shot in her New York City loft; what a conceptually cool addition to a visually well made work of art. Check out her Website for more.

Update: Catherine has informed me that she has a larger show titled the entire American Cockroach project, of which Safari is a part, showing at the Boise Art Museum. You can see Safari in context with the rest of her workby taking a look at http://gallery.me.com/catherinechalmers

From the Invisible 5 Website:

Invisible-5 is a self-guided critical audio tour along Interstate 5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It uses the format of a museum audio tour to guide the listener along the highway landscape.

ABOUT

Invisible-5 investigates the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5 corridor, through oral histories, field recordings, found sound, recorded music, and archival audio documents. The project also traces natural, social, and economic histories along the route.

ROUTE

The tour follows I-5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles, with additional routing via I-580/I-880 to San Francisco. Sites along the tour, which can be driven in either direction, include Livermore, Crows Landing, Kesterson NWR, Kettleman City, and Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles.

Wildless

My mother has a fear of dead birds, she has over the years found them on her porch preceeding the death of more than one loved one. A similar dread fills me when I see Amy Steins work. Growing up, I could sleep with my window open and hear a chorus of insects singing in the forest just beyond my suburban home. Today, those woods are more suburb and the singing has stopped. Amy Stein most likely grew up similarly.

She has made this series Domesticated showing that border between man and nature. Unlike the fertile zones that nature often creates when one environment transitions into another, our man made zone often bears only road kill, broken necked birds, and fear filled animals fleeing across perfect lawns and concret. Amy memoralizes those moments we all experience but only fleetingly as we see deers just past our headlights or navigate over road kill.

An Amazing Discovery

I was amazed to learn that most of my students in one of my classes do not believe in Global Warming or believe that it is not man made. Wow. How to respond?

I came across these websites in searching for artists who address the issue of Global Warming: Global Warming Art which is filled with insightful and shocking graphs-not exactly what I call art but then again.... Green Museum is a great clearing house for artists working on this issue like Buster Simpson and for projects like the above Environmental Art Calendar.

Do you know of others? If so, please share them with me. I have a new syllabus to write! ;)