NY VIRTUAL VOLCANO OBSERVATORY

ARTIST STATEMENTS

Rhea Barve

In Entangled Lives and Lives of a Cell, Merlin Sheldrake and Lewis Thomas write with love and adoration about the complex symbiotic relationships in the lives of fungi and cells that shape our world. Their beautifully descriptive words have inspired me to build ceramic vessels as homes for nested ecosystems. 

 I love mushrooms and natural containers such as burrows, nests, seedpods and shells. By compartmentalizing the interior spaces of ceramic forms, I create caves, cubbies, and crevices for mini communities. This highlights the intimacy and delight of collapsing large environments into miniature models and dioramas. 

 The process of stitching together photogrammetric 3D scans of my sculptures to experience them as digitized landscapes distorts and abstracts reality through pixelated glitches. Embedding these sculptural scans tethers the virtual to the physical, allowing them to be experienced simultaneously.

Taylor Burkhead

My series Praying on Sacred Land: Geospirits and Intimate Waters explores the dynamic relationship between the scientific and the spiritual as the human-made and natural worlds become more dangerously entangled. My artworks mediate a conversation surrounding protection, preservation, and prayers. Through them, I aim to inspire a renewed relationship between humans and the environment that springs from empathy and gratitude rather than greed and indifference. I visualize these intimate relationships through collages in which each component relies on another for meaning and purpose. This inherent collaboration between materials reflects an emerging alliance between scientists, artists, religious and political leaders, native populations, and activists in the fight to tackle environmental degradation. 

These collages are inspired by places where this integrative approach is present: Merapi volcano and LUSI mud volcano in Indonesia, Blue Lake in Taos, New Mexico, and Kaho’olawe, Hawai’i. The scientific and spiritual narratives of these places are intimately intertwined.  The people who live in proximity to these sites remain closely tethered to the land, and live according to values of reciprocity that are often lost in capitalist societies; love the land and it will love you back. I work with a deep love of land and gratitude for the fruitful relationship I maintain with the natural world. I pray my works inspire reflection and meditation on your relationship with the land so that it may care for you.

Jack Helfrich

11 Noland Park is Roach Eater’s primary world. Its peeling paint and leftover spores from Jemila MacEwan’s Dead Gods are deeply informative to and contribute to the piece. LiDAR scans of the house suggest that the house be perceived as a massive topographical landscape. 3D videos of the house were captured during a cleaning day with some of the other artists. 

Roach Eater is in conversation with many worlds in addition to the house at Noland Park; it was born from the sick Manhattan of 2020, a particularly turbulent America, and a world suffering from climate change. Consequently, it is a piece about death, the apocalypse, and a post-human world, but it does not look at these things in an entirely negative or nihilistic way. 

The prevailing symbol of fungi guides Roach Eater’s positive outlook on death and the apocalypse. Fungi have been tragically overlooked by mainstream science, but they have been passionately researched by mushroom enthusiasts and independent mycologists. Because of this, mycology has come to represent the power of citizen science and the ability we all have to contribute to positive change.

Brock Riggins

Using combinations of video, painting, and research-based work I investigate our relationships to both theatrical and non-human spaces, and how interrelating these fields can help us better understand how the spaces we live in influence what we think is possible. In video I combine self-authored narratives with visuals that center around immediate experiences of land in a mixing of filmed and found imagery. With painting, I explore aesthetics of contamination, animal encounter, and ruin. These mediums blend together in wood-panel installations. The spaces often appear theatric, which integrates performance as a part of the work. I believe that only through overlapping the feelings and imageries of the non-human, theatrical, and architectural can we begin to understand contemporary relations to space.

Annick Saralegui

Domestic Science: Recipes for Environmental Data Mining asks: How do we understand ecologies across scales? How can meta-scale anthropocentric problems be observed at the molecular and microbial level on a petri dish? What does it look like to cook drought? 

We have been taught to understand climate change that occurs at the macro level. Apocalyptic visions of ravaged towns and cities inflicted by tsunamis, storms, and rising sea levels are some of the first images that cross our minds. In reality, the most pressing environmental concerns of our time are microbial imbalances which occur at the micro-scale. Microbiomes–the microbial signatures and interactions that makeup landscapes and ecosystems across scales–dictate our experiences of our bodies, the built environment, and nature. 

2020 was the year of the microbe. We are at a critical turning point in which there is a burgeoning interest on the impact of microbes from bacteria and fungi in many areas of our lives.

This series explores how we might respond to our environments and the microbes that exist within them through domestic science experiments that reveal visual and genomic data. Stressful Colors explores the sensory, visual cues created by microbial pigments, which are a form of protection or shield for microbes, to help humans understand how microbes communicate environmental stress. In Reformed Gardening, I explore what I call a “renewed gardening and cooking” in which metagenomics–the study of genomic material from environment sampling–is performed from the kitchen. Together, these ongoing experiments ask how the kitchen can be transformed into an exploratory site for environmental and anthropocene data collection.

Emma Waddell

Bird Ring Studio is an interactive presentation of three musical pieces based on natural ornithological occurrences. It is an extension of three simulations I wrote that turn data into music, either compositionally or improvisitorily. The first piece centers around bird flocking patterns, and acts as an improvisatory instrument that functions as one part of a group of performers. The second focuses on nesting habits and nest parasitization, and creates a piece that is completely self contained, with no need for human interaction. The third and last piece is interested in the organization of neurons in a bird’s brain, and composes and generates sheet music to be played by two or three musicians. Each section of Bird Ring Studio will allow you to read about, interact with, and listen to these original simulations, to further engage viewers. Also, since all the code is open source and accessible online, it encourages viewers to create their own works by using these simulations in a new way, or by adding extensions to them. All three pieces use simple parameters to replicate complicated natural phenomena, to make these algorithms easily accessible and extendable.

Kristina Waymire

I enjoy making objects that are repetitive and laborious, which I have come to recognize as a form of prayer. I do not know what or why I am praying, but through the process of artmaking, I want to find out. I am driven to re-connect to my tribe’s spirituality by searching within my subconscious. I look towards my dreams where time is decaying for answers. I am no longer living on my native land, and what I do know about my family’s origin is from stories. I combine physical and digital sculptures because I want to create a physical connection to an epharial place–to a land I cannot return to.

The metal work in House Plant is based on Inuit tattoo designs that are meant to go on the body and which connect the wearer to the past, present and future. In the sculpture titled, Roadkill, I forced multiple bodies of clay sourced from different locations into one sculpture. I was exploring the uncomfortable feeling of being a half breed native. In Square #2 I was inspired by the love of learning a dialect of Quechua from Cusco. Its rainbow glaze represents the Cusco flag and my happy soul. The sculpture’s red clay gets its color from the iron blood of animals, representing my family ties through blood. 

A large part of my practice is about working with others. Working as an artist duo with Rhea Barves is extremely important to me. I find it wonderful to decentralize the individual artist and egotism of marking art by creating as a pair. My work with Rhea feels like a breath of fresh air. We make objects that hold. In ceramics, it feels inevitable to become transfixed with the idea of a vessel–something that is caring and will hold you. Community is important to me, be it community in family or community in the studio.

Aleyna Weitzner

This past December, I picked up The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey to keep me occupied over the winter break. At first I was a bit skeptical about reading a book about snails; I wasn’t sure how much content a snail could evoke. As I read the book, I became enamoured with the idea of the snail as a subject of art–bringing to light an often-overlooked being, noticed only when we have to step over one to avoid it. This past January, I bought four snails to live with me in a tank in my room. Through taking care of them, I’ve come to know them. I have an understanding of their personalities, which is something I never expected to say about a creature that is often grouped with bugs. Over the past four months, I've been able to witness their life cycle, both in death and new life. My hope is that this artwork will show others, in great detail, the tiny beings around our feet.