Grassland

I explore the affects, politics, and aesthetics of landscape using performance, film/video, and socially-engaged art. While my early work addressed spaces shaped by political struggle, the growing ecological crisis has prompted me to focus on grieving and caring for the damaged landscapes of everyday life. The “slow violence” of global warming—with its spiking rates of extinction, mass displacement, soil loss, and pollinator collapse—intensify existing forms of social violence and challenge the limits of narrative itself. If climate change represents a change of geologic proportions, as many scientists believe, it requires we re-evaluate everything that came before: Western concepts of the autonomous individual, an economics based on perpetual growth, and values systems structured around (some) humans’ needs. The stories we tell about climate change must be big enough to capture complexity, surprising enough to make unexpected connections, and small enough for intimacy, identification, and action.