Artist Book in Progress

Jenny Kendler

I am interested in their works because a lot of their art pieces involve turning the focus onto environmentalism and the human’s relationship to the natural world. She creates works that try to get people immersed and hands-on, becoming a part of the piece like her work with milkweed dispersal balloons, and Tell it to the Birds. A lot of her pieces also work with audio like A confounding mimicry and Playhead of Dawn. They use strategies that help answer the question of how to best represent a topic and bring awareness to people in an artistic fashion. The artist changes their strategies piece by piece, but the reoccurring practice of bringing people into the piece, or creating room for participation tends to be reused.

For their piece Playhead of Dawn, they chose to make a piece about birds and the impact of humans on birds by playing a 24-hour audio piece that recreates the rise of the sun at dawn as the earth rotates around the sun. The audio piece amplifies the bird’s voices, and puts them in the front row for all to hear. The artists collected and compiled thousands of bird song data from around the world, and organized them, and timed them to be played at the correct times as if we could listen in at dawn at any time and geographic location in real-time. A lot of research has been put into making this piece as accurate as possible, even including the earth’s axis of rotation in the calculations of when the audio clips should be played.

The piece might evoke something different for everyone, but there are certainly a lot of things that people can learn just from listening to it. One might notice that throughout the day, certain areas will be silent, which could be due to passing over a body of water, or through an area of habitat that no longer contains birds from which to capture their song audio. The audio and absence of audio are important in this piece, representing the reality of a moment in a bird’s life, and reaching out to people to think about how their human lives can impact the lives of birds around the world.

For their piece, the Milkweed Balloon Dispersal, the artist was responding to the decline of monarch butterflies and making an educational and interactive piece to help make people aware of the decline of Monarch butterflies. They did some research about the habitat impact, and the importance of milkweed as a source of food to the Monarch butterflies. As a piece, they filled balloons with milkweed seeds, and handed them out to citizens, helping educate people, and offering them an opportunity to take part in the piece by bringing a balloon home and popping it somewhere to disperse the seeds in the hopes of increasing the milkweed plant population for the monarch butterflies. The intention of wanting to find an artistic way to reach out to people and educate them on the subject is shown in how they performed their art piece very publicly.

Book Stacking

For these book stacks, I asked all of my roommates to hand over every book they had hidden away in our house. It was fun to see how I could try and organize them in unconventional ways. Trying to piece together books that may have never met before to create new combinations in to universe. I tried to keep in mind color, text, and composition for these pieces. I also have not read any of these books before, so these were all newly discovered titles to me.

Nature Video Art Project

For this project, I was originally interested in working within the intersection of mental health and nature. There are studies showing that mental health can improve with the exposure to green spaces, like forests, parks, beaches, ect., and I think there is a problem with many societies today as population density increases in city areas. It seems people’s lives are centered within human-made walls, and people have become distanced from the natural world. I wanted to try and find a way to expose people to this problem. Avery and I first came up with the idea to set up a living room set in a field and play a nature documentary on a tv in nature, but we moved away from that idea because it was a bit too literal. We then had the idea to play nature documentaries in unconventional places around town, and see how people interacted with them. After further refining of ideas, we came upon the idea to read books to trees.

Trees have long been used and exploited the humans. For Centeries, they have been carefully cut down, and used to make clothing items such as shoes (Wikipedia, n.d), hats and masks (Indigenous Foundations, n.d). Trees have also importantly been used for traditional shelters, and burned to make food (Jiang et al., 2018)… but they can also be abused and slashed down for the lumbar and paper industry (Bergquist et al., 2016), or even for cut for traditions like Christmas. Trees can be mistreated, and cleared for food crops (Dall’Agnol et al, 2022), contaminated from the exhaust of vehicles (Gong et al. 2022), and from the chemicals that can spill into rivers from the textile industry (Dall’Agnol et al, 2022; Grappi et al, 2017). As a society, it seems that people relationship with trees and forests have become removed and distant.

We also wanted to explore how some people have a relationship with trees in the art form of Bonsai. I personaly have had experience trying to make my own bonsai, and we try to bend to tree to do what we what by trimming its roots, physically reshaping the branches, cutting off unwanted branches, and keeping the tree to a small desired size because that is what make sus happy…. but have I ever stoped to thing that is what would make the tree happy? There is even the scientific relationship with labeling specimens and naming all the different parts on the tree, but has anyone ever introduced themselves to one of them?

We felt it was an important task to try and educate a tree on these topics, so that it can learn about the world and introduce it to some of these topics. Of course, we see the irony in our communication because trees can not see, or hear, though they do have many other ways of sensing the world (JIC, 2022). We wanted to see how it would feel to get personal with the one on one session from our very own Aboretum.

References:

Bergquist, Ann-Kristin, and E. Carina H. Keskitalo. “Regulation Versus Deregulation. Policy Divergence Between Swedish Forestry and the Swedish Pulp and Paper Industry after the 1990s.” Forest Policy and Economics, vol. 73, 2016, pp. 10–17, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2016.07.003.

Dall’Agnol, R., Sahoo, P. K., Salomão, G. N., de Araújo, A. D. M., da Silva, M. S., Powell, M. A., Junior, J. F., Ramos, S. J., Martins, G. C., da Costa, M. F., & Guilherme, L. R. G. (2022). Soil-sediment linkage and trace element contamination in forested/deforested areas of the Itacaiúnas River Watershed, Brazil: To what extent land-use change plays a role? The Science of the Total Environment, 828, 154327–154327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.154327

Gong, C., Xian, C., & Ouyang, Z. (2022). Isotopic Composition (delta N-15 and delta O-18) of Urban Forests in Different Climate Types Indicates the Potential Influences of Traffic Exhaust and Relative Humidity. Forests, 13(12), 2060–. https://doi.org/10.3390/f13122060

Grappi, S., Romani, S., & Barbarossa, C. (2017). Fashion without pollution: How consumers evaluate brands after an NGO campaign aimed at reducing toxic chemicals in the fashion industry. Journal of Cleaner Production, 149, 1164–1173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.02.183

Indigenous Foundations, “Cedar”, Arts UBC, n.d., https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/cedar/

Jiang, Hongen, et al. “Drilling Wood for Fire: Discoveries and Studies of the Fire-Making Tools in the Yanghai Cemetery of Ancient Turpan, China.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, vol. 27, no. 1, 2018, pp. 197–206, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-017-0611-5.

John Innes Center, “How do plants sense the world around them?”, JIC, March 2022, https://www.jic.ac.uk/blog/how-do-plants-sense-the-world-around-them/#:~:text=Plants%20have%20special%20structures%20called,far%20red%20and%20ultraviolet%20light.

Wikipedia, “Clogs”, n.d., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clog#

The Tree

In “The Tree”, we film an ironic scene where a girl brings many books to read to the tree to try and educate it on today’s world. The books selected are all related to economic and potential justice issues that we thought a tree might want to know. For example, what we label trees as… is that what they would call themselves? Might the tree want to protest how we treat them like polluting the air and soil with our inventions like cars and clothes, chopping them down for our celebrations, or manipulating their growth because of our beauty standards? The act of reading is also ironic in that the books are made from trees. This short film is intended to explore these concepts through humor, but hopefully, it also allows people to think about how our actions might affect each individual tree. 

Book Project

For this project, I had a few ideas, but the most fun one seemed to cutting out images from a children’s picture encyclopedia and re-making the spreads. The difficult thing at first was trying to find connections or interesting images within the book, and then deciding on an interesting composition of how to re-arrange the images. After a lot of trial and error, this was my end result:

The Picture Encyclopedia, 2023 edition is better than ever. This book allows the images to come to life, and re-image the world without any labels. Explore the pages and find surprising images. The book is created from a children’s picture encyclopedia, however, the 2023 edition is an attempt to deconstruct the built narratives in the book and instead rebuild a more freeing and educating book on how one should expect the world to work. Take a look for yourself. See how it makes you feel. Cut out the images and make your own world. It’s fun.

Take a stand:

Barbara Kruger

Kruger is a text based artist who has been creating pieces for a very long time. They create these large prints of questions and installs them in places where the public can be confronted by the questions, like the public installation in the skate park. with Kruger’s work being primarily large text, they dismantle the artist’s trope of having complex paintings or sculptures for people to interpret, and instead offer the message directly for people to understand. It is nice that the text created is still something that people have to think about, and is not just an answer provided. Their pieces often are related to current issues in society, and offer messages for people to reflect on them. Kruger uses topics that are important to her, and allows that to fuel her work. 

I like that the art pieces are simple in theory, and effective it terms of offering awareness to people. Words can be a very powerful medium, and being able to create enlarged messages is a great way to share and inform people about important topics. It makes me realize that I can incorporate the right words and messages in the pieces I create.

Marry Reid Kelly

In Mary’s work of “You made me iliad” she explores the narrative and experiences of WWII woman and sex workers. She explains that there are very few records of their experiences, due to societal reasonings, and so she feels it is important to explore their roles as a way of stating their lives on the record for them. I thought it was a very interesting piece because she says that this concept is something that can only really be shown in art. I think that it was a smart choice to use the little information that was provided by male documentation to piece together the information to create a mosaic of the woman’s experience. I like that it is a serious topic in creating justice for women of the past, but the black-and-white character design, setting, and script add elements to the intention of the piece that make it a bit more digestible for the people watching. It inspires me to see what other narratives have been lost in time for future projects.

Artist Multiple

For this project, I knew I wanted to go in a direction that inspired people to explore the world around them. I personally enjoy adventures, and I wanted to create a piece that could inspire people to explore as well. With the help of Nathan, I am proud to present the following maps….

Here to Nowhere

and

Here to Somewhere

Are you tired? Do you wake up in the morning, bored and uninspired? Well fear no more! The map to Nowhere and to Somewhere is just what you need. These maps offer you the route to the road trip of a lifetime, where you can drive from wherever you are, all the way to Nowhere, Oklahoma! But wait, you can keep driving all the way to Somewhere, New York! The route is displayed for easy directions, however, there are many alternative routes that may intrigue you. Get your maps today and go Nowhere, or Somewhere. It’s up to you.

The maps can be printed in any size, and can be folded for convenient traveling. The bold red path is sure to guide you to your destination. This particular series is designed to provide directions from Guelph, Ontario to Nowhere and Somewhere. These maps can be edited to provide directions from all over the world.