Environmental Art: reflection, provocation, and action

Project Zero invites you to bring your lunch and join us on Thursday, December 6, 12:30pm-2:00pm for a PZ Brown Bag Lunch around Environmental Art: reflection, provocation, and action, an artists’ discussion with educators David Buckley Borden and Aaron M Ellison. This event will take place in the Nelson conference room, #429, in the Project Zero offices on the 4th floor of Longfellow Hall, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA. Please RSVP to Jordy Oakland at jordy_oakland@harvard.edu, if you plan to attend. 

 

This BBL focuses on the role of environmental art as a lens for reflection, source of provocation, and inspiration for action. We introduce two recent sculptural installations – Hemlock Hospice (on view at Harvard Forest through November 17) and Warming Warning (on view at Harvard’s Science Center Plaza through December 7). We discuss whether and how reflections about environmental change presented in Hemlock Hospice provoked responses by visitors, viewers, and ourselves about "what can we do” [to stop climate or other environmental change disturbing our sense if stability] and how this “critique” in turn inspired Warming Warning as an impetus for direct action. We ask if action-oriented sculptures like Warming Warning limit the range of responses by those who experience it despite their being able to see the issue from many angles and the inclusion in Warming Warning of a primed reflection-bench that confers agency on the viewer. A short presentation about the work by the artists will be followed by an open discussion of these topics and issues.

 

David Buckley Borden is a Cambridge Massachusetts-based interdisciplinary artist and designer. Using an accessible combination of art and design, David promotes a shared environmental awareness and heightened cultural value of ecology. David’s work manifests in a variety of forms, ranging from site-specific landscape installations in the woods to data-driven cartography in the gallery and have recently earned him residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Trifecta Hibernaculum, and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. David was a 2016/2017 Charles Bullard Fellow at the Harvard Forest where he answered the question, “How can art and design foster cultural cohesion around environmental issues and help inform ecology-minded decision making?” David continues to collaborate with Harvard researchers, to champion a cultural ecology supported by innovative interdisciplinary science-communication. Learn more about David and his work at http://davidbuckleyborden.com/.

 

Aaron M. Ellison is the Senior Research Fellow in Ecology in Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Senior Ecologist at the Harvard Forest, and a semi-professional photographer and writer. He studies the disintegration and reassembly of ecosystems following natural and anthropogenic disturbances; thinks about the relationship between the Dao and the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis; reflects on the critical and reactionary stance of Ecology relative to Modernism, blogs as The Unbalanced Ecologist, and tweets as @AMaxEll17. He is the author of A Primer of Ecological Statistics (2004/2012), A Field Guide to the Ants of New England (2012), Stepping in the Same River Twice: Replication in Biological Research (2017), Carnivorous Plants: Physiology, Ecology, and Evolution (2018), and Vanishing Point (2017), a collection of photographs and poetry from the Pacific Northwest. On Wednesdays, he works wood. Learn more about Aaron and his work at http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/aaron-ellison.