Kota Ezawa’s lightbox, Earth from Moon 2005, a transformation of the iconic 1969 image of planet earth seen from the moon, announces the largest context of SUSTAINABLE?: global ecology. Sustainable development is a global challenge, and requires ecological awareness, that is awareness of the relationship of all organisms (plants, animals, and humans) to their environment. Gro Brundtland speaks of the urgency of our situation: “From space, we see a small and fragile ball dominated not by human activity and edifice but by a pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery, and soils. Humanity's inability to fit its activities into that pattern is changing planetary systems, fundamentally. Many such changes are accompanied by life-threatening hazards. This new reality, from which there is no escape, must be recognized - and managed.”

The thesis of this exhibition is that ecologically aware art is an effective means of promoting such recognition. As Lucy Lippard says, "Modern ecologists may have reached a limit on how effectively they can convey messages to the public, and they may now need to draw upon the emotional vibrancy offered by the arts."

Wulke’s Landing of the New Alien, using faceted glass and a wooden branch, sounds an alarm about global changes and presents the possible effects of inaction. “We do not want,” she says,” to have the natural landscape become only available to us ‘underglass.’” In his intricate sketch World Grid—Square World Matt Bua questions how effectively we have managed our human activity: “A drawing that skims the surface of the history of renewable energy usages and how they have been destroyed, forgotten, and scoffed at.”       

(1)              (2)

(1) Joy Wulke, Heaven to Earth and Back Again, 2009. Glass, plaster hand casts, gold leaf leaves, branches, 108h x 48w x 36d in.; Landing of the New Alien, 2002. Glass, branch, silica, granite. 54h x 48w x 30d in.; The Elements, 4 digital photographs, 19 x 37 in. each. Courtesy of the artist.

The history of sustainability in America becomes poignant as one moves through the nineteenth century. Karl Bodmer’s 1832-43 prints record the pristine splendour of America’s western landscape in View of the Stone Walls on the Upper Missouri and in New Harmony on the Wabash the settling of America’s early utopian communities on the edge of Indiana’s Western frontier. The continuing progress of urbanization and industrialization of the landscape, at once magnificent and fearful, is suggested in Dana Melamed’s Driven 2008. In addition to using charcoal and ink on canvas, she creates her ruinous cityscapes by dipping film-printing waste into acrylic and glue, melting it with a torch and incising it with a razor.  Perhaps only the abstract pictorial language found in Dannielle Tegeder’s Puriamond: Cascade System of Destruction & Explosions can begin to suggest the rapidity of change, as dynamic systems, once thrown out of kilter, speed up out of control -- a futurist sci-fi scenario?

Historical CO2 and temperature.

Graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and mean global temperature during the past 1000 years.

Fact: Global temperatures have increased exponentially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with its reliance on fossil fuel. Burning coal and oil releases growing quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere creating a dangerous greenhouse effect: global warming.

How do humans manage the disruptive effects of global warming? Conceptual and performance artist Xavier Cortada, in The Longitudinal Installation 2007, placed 24 shoes in a circle around the South Pole, each representing a person living along a different longitude but affected by global climate change. “We are one global community.” Lift the audio phone to hear Cortada reciting the 24 Time Zone Quotes by these individuals about the effects of global warming as they are already experiencing them.

In his ceramic piece Long Nook 2007, Warren Mather, by a simple rotation of 90 degrees, transforms photographs of cresting waves into an image of “a flood tide that does not recede, an emblem of the rise in ocean levels, an inevitable consequence of global warming.” Fact: If changes aren’t made to lessen greenhouse emissions, the 100 year flood zone in New London/Groton will flood every 17-32 years, putting the Northeast Corridor Rail line, Ferry terminals, and the General Dynamics Electric Boats shipyard underwater. Learn more about the effects of sea level rise in CT by visiting www.climatechoices.org/assets/documents/climatechoices/connecticut_necia.

To manage these dilemmas, it is vital that children come to understand the mechanisms of Global Warming, the title of a video made by 7-11 year olds at the Green Street Arts Center in Middletown, CT.

What is the role of beauty in bringing attention to humanity’s transformations of nature? While the nineteenth century sense of the sublime in nature, the overwhelming power of nature over man, is still evident in Wulke’s photographs of nature’s Elements, the late 20^th century artist Edward Burtynsky create mesmerizing, even beautiful images of the toxic sublime, landscapes transformed through human power: blasted quarries, strip mines, the Three Gorges Dam project in China, mountains of old tires. “You need to give people a reason to stop and look. What I do is set up a tension. We are visually compelled to look at the very thing we are trying not to see, like forbidden fruit.”

 Confronted with the dumping grounds of our industrial waste, what are we to do? Art can help to raise our consciousness of global and regional ecologies, their degradation --and the need to protect them, as signaled in Chappell’s Earth Envelopes. At the local level Peter Waite in his meticulously realist painting shows us the beautiful Connecticut River edged with trash and discarded automobiles.  Bob Johnson’s Prout Fishing in America Rivercube, a sculpture made from trash collected from a stream emptying into the Connecticut River, alerts us to the relatedness of upstream detritus and downriver pollution. The Bass Brook running by and under CCSU is part of the Park River Watershed, which flows through Hartford and empties into the Connecticut River, which empties into the Long Island Sound and hence into the world’s oceans. More than a sculpture made of recycled trash, a Rivercube project is a participatory action, “engaging communities in urban watershed stewardship.” Join Bob Johnson in the making of a Bass Brook Basin Rivercube on Friday April 24! Collect trash along this waterway, witness at a local waste management plant its sculptural compression, and the siting of the Rivercube near its source. This Rivercube action kickoffs the Park Water Arts Campaign 2009-15, coinciding with Phase I of Hartford’s $800 million dollar MDC Clean Water Project.

Most of us are aware of the need to shift away from our dependence on fossil fuels. Fact: Cars and trucks account for 41% of Ct’s total carbon emissions. Each gallon of gas used is responsible for 25 pounds of heat-trapping emissions. Would you consider driving a Smart Car known for its low CO2 emissions and artful design? See Sideways: A Smart Art Project to view eco artists’ work in Smart Car’s advertizing campaign. Eric Benson, a graphic designer committed to principles of sustainability (see www.renourish.com), has designed posters announcing a Sustainable Revolution, challenging individuals, businesses, governments to embrace alternative clean energy sources, whether wind, solar, or geothermal.

Much less discussed are the consequences of dependence upon fossil fuels in the industrial production and distribution of food. On its computer site Free Soil, a collaboration of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners, uses “oranges as a vehicle to explore the complex relationships that make up the worlds Food Systems,” declaring “the right to know,” for instance “how much CO2 is produced to get this piece of fruit to YOU?” Fact: Food travels on average 1500 miles from farm to table.  The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States. In the late 1960s the community gardening movement started in America. But is Scott Prior’s Community Garden a garden neglected? The verbal play of Juliana Sabinson’s tablecloth- “Sustain able” - graces the Urban Oaks Farm Stand where fresh produce from New Britain's Organic Farm Urban Oaks is for sale. You might wonder: Can a farm stand relocated in a gallery possibility be art? Concept art, originating in the late 1960s, has taught us that art need not use traditional media of art (sculpture or painting), but different systems (for instance social, economic, natural). Sabinson’s tablecloth visually dramatizes an alternative food system: organic, local, and healthy. Buy from the food stand and you buy food of high nutritional quality that hasn’t traveled 1500 food miles.

Scott Prior, Community Garden, oil on canvas. Courtesy of New Britain Museum of American Art.

(1) Matt Robinson, Try, Try Again, 2008. Acrylic, polymer and clipping on canvas, 30 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist

(2) Barbara Hocker, Preservation of Solitude, 2004. White oak branches, inkjet prints, monotypes, cotton, rice paper, silk, waxed linen, copper, 30 x 47 x 10 in. Courtesy of the artist

You might wish to look into the FACT BOOK and the ARTISTS’ STATEMENTS BOOK on the table in the gallery.

Please take a moment to fill in the Response Sheet! Leave in the Response Sheet Box as you leave the Gallery.