How to Postpone the End

Here we reach the dark pinnacle of our exhibition. The five artists featured in this Viewing Room explore the most potent aspects of the climate crisis. How to Postpone the End invites reflections concerning the intrinsic relations between the degradation of ecosystems caused by modern large-scale industrial processes and the long history of exploitation of natural resources, invasion of territories, and the extermination of populations and cultures produced by the still ongoing colonisation processes around the world, including in South America where artist Felipe de Ávila Franco comes from. The project suggests an encounter among modern and rudimentary technologies and a clash between scientific perspectives and the ancient and grounded “cosmovision” to mitigate this fearful, disturbed, and impersonal corporeity of the so absent contexts of the present, in the attempt to avoid or at least to postpone the end.

De Ávila Franco writes that the Brazilian indigenous leader’s words ‘confront the very (lack of) principles and will in the society we have become: technologically advanced, humanistically numb and spiritually disconnected. In the meanwhile, two world trends are powerfully reshaping human existence: the degradation of large parts of the natural world and unprecedented technological development. Technology has changed human agency in the environment and has already begun to change our species’ long standing experience since the implementation of mechanical and automated methods and systems have drastically increased the efficiency of our illusory and relentless sovereignty over the natural world. Nature, not in the sense of all that exists and happens but what occurs without intentional human agency, is being pushed to the corners of our reality while the exponential growth of population and industrial activity increasingly degrades the environment, from forests and atmosphere to oceans and land.’

The works here combine images and materials collected from different parts of Finland and Brazil into pieces that translate the current social environmental crisis, inviting reflections on how the geographically distant dystopias deeply affect our immediate reality on both material and immaterial levels, regardless of where we are. The series sheds light on the misguided notions of human society and the environment as separate entities in a conflicting relationship, trapped in a struggle with the technological machinery that, as a gigantic extension of ourselves, expands through space and whose effect can last in time, exceed life, generations, human and non-human species.

Felipe de Ávila Franco is a Brazilian artist and researcher, based in Helsinki since 2013, born and raised in the Southeastern region of Brazil, where intense industrial activities and the exploitation of natural resources through mining companies are the main economic power, responsible for an accelerated alteration of the landscape and destruction of ecosystems.

Through the lens of environmental aesthetics, his work addresses a genuine concern with the socio-environmental crisis, exploring the boundaries between mediums and materials such as petrochemical residues and contaminated soil collected from regions of large-scale industrial activity or where environmental disasters have been reported. These materials are incorporated by his artistic process and through the combination of traditional and experimental techniques, they are transfigured into sculptures, ceramic series, installations, and other interventions.

Death by Plastic

This artist’s ongoing environmental concern led her to research the lifecycle of plastic in hopes of addressing the attendant issues of a product which is both incredibly useful and undeniably one of the leading causes of pollution on the planet. For years, many countries were sending their plastics to overseas where some types were being recycled and made into new products, while the less desirable ones were being landfilled, or worse, burned. China’s recent refusal to accept these materials is a wakeup call for countries faced with not only a glut of plastic but also a lack of infrastructure to process them.

‘People worldwide are feeling outraged’, Spiess tells us, ‘betrayed by the fact that, after years of carefully rinsing and sorting our plastics, we discover that recycling is almost a myth. The result of my research is an ongoing series titled Death by Plastic. The piece aims to draw attention to issues of refuse and recycling by highlighting the plastic products regionally that are no longer profitable or possible to recycle.’

‘In the summer of 2019, I performed Death by Plastic for the first time in Moab, Utah, a small community seasonally infiltrated by tourists who come to explore the extraordinary pristine landscapes but leave behind large quantities of refuse the local municipality needs to manage. I have been creating art in the area for nearly two decades and have observed the community become incrementally more sustainable. When I arrived in Moab this year, I discovered that only plastics #1 and #2 are being recycled, everything else is landfilled. I felt like I had been hit by lightning and thought I would drop dead there, at the recycling centre. After a sleepless night, I decided to build a clear casket to lay in covered by plastics 3,4,5,6 & 7, which can no longer be recycled. The work was photographed on the local landfill, where the plastics would eventually end up.’

Venice, Italy is facing similar issues but on a grander scale. Thousands of tourists invade the city daily, leaving behind tons of waste, much of which is single-use plastic bottles. What’s not sorted ends up in canals and then out in the lagoon – a fragile body of water already facing countless challenges. ‘Part of the problem is that as consumers we have become incredibly lazy. The larger issue, however, is that corporations keep producing and wrapping products in plastics which are often not recyclable. The responsibility to solve this dilemma lies not only on the consumers but expressly on the corporations producing these products. To solve this problem, we need to make a significant paradigm shift and be willing to change our habits – as consumers, as product and packaging designers, and as corporations.’ On November 7th 2019, Spiess encased her body in a casket made of transparent plexiglas filled with fishing nets and single use plastics. A gondola carried the casket silently through the waterways of Venice, drawing attention to this globally significant issue.

There is a sense of frustrated helplessness throughout this project, but importantly, it highlights the items that we think – or hope – are being recycled and are instead being landfilled, or worse. Many of us have long assumed that the recyclables we were carefully cleaning and sorting were being processed and eventually re-used. The reality is that our planet is being smothered in plastic.

Anne-Katrin Spiess is a Swiss artist based in the USA. Her work can best be defined as conceptual land art.

In her own words, ‘I am interested in spaces, both physical and psychological and how the two relate to one another. I create site-specific projects in wide-open and extremely remote landscapes, where the severance from civilisation creates distance from the “real” world. My projects exist only for a few hours or days at a time, before they are disassembled, and the landscape is returned to its original condition. I document the works through photography, video and text.

Because of my close connection to nature and the deep sense of responsibility I feel towards the planet, several of my installations address and call attention to environmental concerns. As a result, I pay close attention to the materials I use, often employing the elements around me as source material. I collect or borrow from nature and occasionally introduce man- or machine-made materials as subtle reminders of human civilisation.

Performance and ritual also play an essential role in my work. Often, I use my own body in addition to what I find at a specific site, and the space takes on significance through the actions performed in it.

Much of my work is created in the deserts of the American West – the issue of desertification features prominently in my work – even though I am based in New York City. This dichotomy fuels my practice, and both places provide me with endless and disparate stimuli. I am able to work in incredibly isolated locales thanks to an Airstream trailer which becomes my traveling studio and hermitage for weeks at a time. When I find a site, I meditate with it, and after time I begin to work. My practice is a way of exploring solitude, and of becoming completely immersed in and with the land.’

Precarious Living

In the fall of 2019, Tom Rice spent four months in Alberta, Canada, researching and developing material for an installation project that investigates North America’s unsustainable appetite for oil, and the impact of this on the environment. During this time, he was a Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Arts and Humanities at the University of Alberta.

After conducting his research, field-trips and meetings with Canadian scholars and artists, he settled on using a local oil refinery as the main visual resource for his project. ‘An influential book for me at the time was Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. The book’s title summed up perfectly how I was feeling about the predicament we face as climate change looms large. Ghosh essentially asks how we could have deluded ourselves so thoroughly about the realities of climate change when we had the facts and the chance to do something about it. What were we thinking?’

Ghosh’s approach avoids a good/bad binary to a certain degree, but implicates us all in the causes and denial of climate change. Rice pares back Ghosh’s arguments, but retains the message that ‘we are all implicated in the crisis of climate change by our inaction and participation in the fossil fuel economy.’

‘I felt that the refinery was a perfect contemplative object for our dilemma. For my project, titled Precarious Living, the Strathcona Refinery acts as a stand-in for the fossil fuel industry and its network throughout North America. The refinery complex is visible from all over the city of Edmonton, and people go about their lives in the shadow of it trying desperately not to think about the health and environmental implications it represents. The dirty business of fossil fuel exaction, refinement, and transportation typically take place outside the purview of most as we go about our daily activities ignoring the risks burning fossil fuels pose. Ghosh refers to this climate change denial as the Great Derangement.’

These images serve to remind the viewer of the inescapably ubiquitous petroculture in which we all are immersed, executed here quite consciously using vinyl acrylic (plastic) paint on thin plastic sheeting. The result is to suggest a maze, an all-encompassing world, or a perpetual never ending environment with no apparent way out.

Tom Rice is an American artist, whose artwork arises out of a concern for the environment, fossil fuel dependency and the growing global crisis related to climate change. His drawing installations explore our relationship to the planet we inhabit and the viability of a sustainable future.

In his own words, ‘the materials of my artistic practice are synchronised with, or are in opposition to, the environmental content of the work. I use thin plastic sheeting that can be folded, easily stored and cheaply shipped. In this way the work takes on the characteristics typically associated with sustainability. The obvious irony however is that the plastic that supports my drawing installations is made from petroleum or natural gas. The work questions whether it is possible to retreat from an industry that is so ubiquitously woven into every aspect of our existence and is the very foundation of our economy.

Much of my work focuses on the fossil fuel industries’ desire for profit at any cost and its effect upon the natural environment. Previous installations, like Extinguishing the Fire, explore domains where humans have failed to behave as good stewards of the planet and the effect of that negligence. We knowingly contribute to the degradation of the environment and do little to curtail behaviours that significantly contribute to the global crisis.

The problem is so large that it can seem abstract, but my projects seek to make the damage specific and personal, bringing human scale to a planetary catastrophe. The work mourns, reflects and documents the shifting uncertainties of the world. The drawings themselves are monumental. The scale is all-encompassing, a world unto itself – a reminder of the all-pervasive effects that climate change will have on our lives.’

Intertwined Stories

In September 2020, New Zealander Dr Stephanie Borelle PhD published, along with her colleagues at National Socio-Ecological Synthesis Centre (SESYNC), the results of two years of modelling future scenarios. They were seeking to discover how effective global commitments to reduce plastic pollution in the face of increasing production, consumption, and population growth would be. These are her findings in her words:

It turns out if governments around the world adhere to their global commitments to reduce plastic pollution, and all other countries join in these efforts, in 2030, we may still emit as much as 53 M.T. of plastic waste into the world’s freshwater and marine ecosystems. Global commitments do not match the scale of the problem. So, then we wanted to know how much effort it would be to achieve a global reduction target of less than 8 M.T. using existing mitigation strategies:

Reducing plastic waste (which includes bans)
Improving waste management
Recovery (i.e. clean-up) from the environment

The level of effort is astonishing, even with parallel actions in all three solutions. We have to reduce plastic waste by 25–40% across all economies and we have to increase the level of waste management by extraordinary numbers – from 6% to 60% managed in low-income economies, AND We have to clean up 40% of annual plastic emissions. To put this final number into people-power, the clean-up effort alone would require the efforts of at least 1 billion people participating in Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup – a Herculean task given this is a 90,000% increase in affirmative action from the 2019 clean-up.

Intertwined Stories is a new series in development as the artist considers what this research means for the future. It forms part of an ongoing exploration of ‘water as an archive for memory, feeling, desire and ecological trauma’, she tells us. Employing both cameraless and photographic techniques, Intertwined Stories explores the tension between the surface beauty of the ocean and the plastic pollution beneath the surface.

Cultural theorist Janine Macleod describes the sea as ‘an infinite water in which everything is retained and where all times mingle together.’ Astrida Neimanis expands on this theory: ‘it enables the sensuous experience of disparate temporalities and sutures the past to the future.’

Salvaged on daily beach walks, Woods-Jack’s collection of ocean plastics grows. ‘Each piece is a testament to consumption. Each item of ocean rubbish washed up on our beaches holds a narrative of consumerism, of time spent with the item as an individual or collectively and, more importantly, a lack of care in waste management both personally and collectively. Upon entering our waterways and the ecosystem, plastics fracture into tiny pieces, indiscernible from their original form and use, leaving trauma in its wake.’

When enlarged, the shape and form of the fragmented objects take on a sculptural appearance. The endless floating of these colourful, shiny objects in the dark depths of these images aims to draw the viewer in much in the way we are drawn to consume. This series, paired with pictures of the ocean’s surface (see banner image above) and the research findings of the data above, aims to engage the audience into a deeper conversation and affirmative action at all levels about how we consume and engage with the world around us.

Virginia Woods-Jack is a British-born photographic artist, advocate and curator currently living and working in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Her practice explores notions of connection to place, materiality and memory to consider relationships between the human and more-than-human worlds. She aims to understand how memory informs how people interact with the natural environment to highlight the importance of care in navigating the climate crisis, which is integral to preserving the planet.

Woods-Jack is the founder and curator of Women in Photography NZ & AU. She has exhibited widely, both locally and internationally, and her work is held in private collections in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom.

Stranded, Dredge & Regulator

Fae Logie’s sculptural works examine notions of imbalance within a warming Arctic marine ecosystem and its geopolitical territory. Often, our first glimmer of environmental harm is that something seems out of place, Logie explains.

‘Stranded, looming nine feet tall speaks of a fragile equilibrium. Cast from a single cetacean vertebrae its skeleton has no definition, no distinct tail or ribcage, no scapula or skull. Weathered, as if dug from an icy grave, an untimely death, we question its spinal deformity. The height of Stranded coincides with the length of a female beluga, yet this hybrid marine organism takes on mythological proportions. As if a display specimen for comparative anatomy, its upright orientation also speaks of a personal narrative. Witnessing a beluga whale kept in a small aquarium pool, her body was positioned vertically in the water. For hours she would slowly spiral upward, drift down, spiral up. Over and over, trapped within her space.’

‘There are multiple hazards to the precarious balance for Arctic marine life due to human impacts and climate change. Bioaccumulation and biomagnifications of pollutants and micro plastics is prevalent in whales. The high solubility of carbon dioxide in cold-water temperatures means acidity levels are rising at twice the rate of the southern oceans. The resultant chemistry threatens the structural integrity of shellfish. As depicted in Dredge, their dissolving shells and subsequent mortality is having a negative impact on a short vulnerable food chain. Stranded, left behind, in a pace of uncertainty.’

Regulator (below) poses as an antique wall clock, its hands stilled at minutes to midnight, capturing this need to hold back time. It insinuates notions to regulate or to control. The clock face encompasses the territory north of the Arctic Circle. Countries extending beyond this line are hand drawn in white ink, seemingly floating on the fragile paper surface. There are no indications of states or borders, no names to locate a fixed point. Arrows define currents and gyres transecting the pole, regulators of climate lost in an open sea. In absence of a pendulum, a tray from a scientific balance suspends, motionless; a mirrored surface weighs a replica of a battleship originating from a childhood game board. Its reflection poses as a tiny misplaced iceberg. Beneath the tray, a thin pulsing vein of blue light coils down within a glass funnel to flow out the V-shaped bottom, as through the hull of a ship. It terminates with a plumb knob dangling just off the floor making reference to transit instruments or processes and sensory apparatus for ocean mapping and data collection.

While Russia redevelops military bases, the United States increases northern capabilities. Though most regard the North West Passage as International, Canada sees it as domestic waterways, asserting its naval presence. Asian and Nordic states are part of this highly strategic geopolitical positioning. Regulator addresses these issues of sovereignty and security in a warming Arctic, being reframed by Indigenous claims. Hanging in the balance, this eminent “ticking clock” is set. The pulsing light, a warning.

Born and raised on the West Coast of Canada, Fae Logie is an interdisciplinary Canadian artist whose research and material-based practice operates within the registers of the scientific and the poetic, the conceptual and environmental.

Embracing elements of sculpture, drawing, photography and video she utilises the juxtaposition of found and manufactured objects within the context of real and imagined spaces. Inquiring into how people create a sense of identity though the ecology and history of place, Logie examines alternative ways of knowing and engagement with our environment – be that wilderness or urban settings, human or non-human. Ensconced in critical observation, her work often employs an element of jest, subverting a purely objective inquiry by questioning the systems and methodologies that dictate our lives.

Interested in making correspondences between local and distant landscapes, Logie has exhibited in artist-run and municipal galleries across Canada as well as participated in international artist residencies and shows in Iceland, the UK, New Zealand and Norway. She was a founding member of the Vancouver-based land art collective, Art is Land Network in 2011.

Logie holds a BSc from Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, BC), a BFA from the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC). Biology is a discipline that continues to inform her work. She has been the recipient of research and production grants from the British Columbia Cultural Services, the Canada Council, the Vancouver Foundation and the Banff Centre of the Arts.

Logie continues to live and work on a rural island setting off Vancouver, located within the traditional unceded territories of the Tslei-wa-tuth, Squamish and Musqueam First Nations.