 great to see you. I wanted to just start really quickly by doing a land acknowledgement. So I have a few things, a few remarks, and then we'll move right into Reagan's presentation. The Center for Visual Arts acknowledges the privilege we have to gather in this place once the territories and homelands of so many Indigenous peoples, including the Arapaho and Cheyenne nations. We respect the many diverse Indigenous people still connected to this land and value the knowledge systems they have developed in relationship to their land. We understand that offering a land acknowledgement neither absolves settler colonial privilege nor diminishes colonial structures of violence at either the individual or institutional level. Land acknowledgments must be accompanied with ongoing commitments to displaced Indigenous and immigrant communities. In order to learn more about spatial relationships of Indigenous communities to lands, we recommend visiting natives-land.ca and exploring the interactive map there. So as I mentioned, we're the off-campus gallery at Art Center for MSU Denver, and we act as a resource both for students and the greater community through contemporary exhibitions of local significance and global reach. We also offer an immersive education program to high school students and MSU Denver students and workforce development for those interested in creative fields. So I just want to give a shout out and thanks to the amazing team here at CVA who work so hard to pull this exhibition together. We are mainly staffed by college students and so they get the opportunity to learn how to run an art center from all the nuts and bolts. And so our students installed this amazing exhibition. So many, many thanks to them. Thank you also to our Leadership Council and their volunteers who spend time and spread the word about CVA and grow our community and of course thanks to our sponsors. This exhibition, Entanglements, came together from a collaboration that I had with MSU Denver Art Professor Natasha Sidenak. Natasha is right here in the front. Natasha and I worked together on several exhibitions and I just want to say thank you so much for your vision and your enthusiasm that you brought to curating this exhibition with me. I love working with you. Okay so without further ado I want to introduce Regan Rosberg. She's an interdisciplinary artist and naturalist. Her work examines the intersection of human beings in the natural world. Often through the lenses of eco-psychology and science. Regan received her BFA from the University of Colorado Boulder in the year 2000 and her MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design in 2016. She is an environmental artist advisor for the Center of Local Prosperity in Nova Scotia and so many more things. But I will let her tell you about her career and work and please help me welcome Regan Rosberg. Everybody. I would like to thank all of you for joining me here today and to Natasha and Cecily and Katie and all of the students at MSU who put together this amazing exhibition. It's really an honor to be part of this. As Cecily said I am an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on how human beings interact with respond to and alter their natural environment. I work between disciplines of science, eco-psychology, history and some social practice. My work always has layers of meaning and speaks through carefully chosen symbolic imagery, materials, mediums and locations. I'm a painter, a sculptor, an installation artist, a profumist, a photographer and I have made one short film. With the focus on the natural world and the catastrophic changes that are happening globally, part of my goal as an artist is to reframe one's awareness. This can mean to remind the viewer of the natural world through a sense of investigation, awe and wonder. It can also gently probe the needer response of consumerism, allowing the viewer to question what choices are made for them and what different choices can possibly be made by them. Paying attention to the world reveals both horror and beauty. Some of my works are disorienting and uncomfortable while others reorient the viewer through the familiarity of biophilia, but many of my works are both. Some of my works are viewed from the outside, some ask the viewer to participate. My latest work actually moves through the world on people's bodies. I love looking at my work in new ways and this exhibition provided me with a new opportunity to reframe my work. To be entangled means to be twisted together or caught in. It means also to involve in difficulties or complicated circumstances from which it is difficult to escape. I would also argue that to be entangled can be a blissful and humbling experience, getting oneself over to an interconnected web that carries with it responsibility. How are we entangled with the natural world? When and how do we see ourselves as part of or separate from nature? And what is nature? I will show in this presentation how the language we use to describe nature is an evolving, ever-changing, fluid, boundless process over time. I will also show that our willingness to embrace ambivalence around our actions for better or for worse can shape the course of our futures and every living thing on earth. So I'd first like to just tell you a little bit about me. I grew up in the woods outside of Colorado Springs across the street from the 450-acre ponderous of pine forests and it left an indelible mark on me as a child because I literally spent all of my time surrounded by trees playing with insects, looking at birds, investigating, and exploring. That is a picture of me on the right when I won an Arbor Day contest for a coloring contest of a rainbow and I won a little tree at my feet right there. Literally documentation of when I started my art career. That instinct to absorb myself in the natural world and this curiosity really did carry through my education and into my adulthood and my art career. I've traveled all over the world to explore different ecosystems and these are pictures of me with different hairstyles and different glasses on different residencies whether I went to an actual residency or created one for myself. And whenever I go to a new place I'm always looking at things on both a macro and a micro scale meaning that I'm looking at things in terms of the the intricacies of how things are put together and what's happening while also thinking about this bigger global picture of how things fit in how the natural world fits into that. And oftentimes I will collect things as I'm traveling or locally. Things like seed pods, wasp nests, somebody gave me that pig heart I did not find it. But the reason I collect these things is because I feel like a seed pod or an insect or a wasp nest is it's a it's a reverent kind of a relic for me. It means that this thing lived and it was doing its own thing living its own life a beautiful expression of this long history of evolution and it also was a part of something so much greater than itself that I could never possibly comprehend. So I have a huge collection of dead things. I'm also obviously very inspired by naturalists and you'll see this influence a lot in my paintings which is what I'm going to start off with. People like Ernst Haeckel and James Audubon and then in terms of my paintings I have a very heavy influence from the Dutch masters and particularly Vanitas still lives. So people like Jan van Heisum and Rachel Roesch in particular I love the fact that these bouquets show insects and different animals and also this state of becoming and falling apart. And so there's this cyclical nature that's embedded in the idea of the Vanitas and also this idea that we can't take things with us so we need to appreciate the ephemerality of what's living now. And my work actually as a whole was described to me in a studio visit as a Vanitas. All of my work kind of fits into this idea of paying attention to what's here and also thinking about death and what happens after and before in these cycles. So this is a close-up of Rachel Roesch's piece and I wanted to show you this as I move into my paintings because you will see a direct relationship. The black background for me also representing this void and also oil in a way with a lot of my paintings. I also include typically birds that have to do with some aspect of climate change or conservation. So these birds in this painting in particular have what's called a Kirtland warbler. And they're actually a success story in terms of conservation. They migrate from Michigan down to the Bahamas and their jackpine forests were protected and so their numbers are actually on the rise. This is a picture close-up of the female. I also include a lot of tulips when I'm making paintings of bouquets because tulips during the time of the Vanitas Dutch still lifes were at one point worth more than gold and they were an expression of wealth. And they were also some of the first genetic splicing that we were doing. We were trying to breed new varieties of tulips. I thought that was pretty important. So moving on into my resin paintings, I created a Vanitas but I started to build it up with a different material specifically plastic. And so I created this process of layering layers of plastic with the actual dead little relics and painted imagery. And I specifically chose plastic because when you compare it to this idea of the Vanitas and this idea that things only last a certain amount of time but you're encasing it in a material that lasts over a thousand years, it has a very different message. So the message is subverted by the material. And I also have in this piece a jellyfish which is on the rise now. They're 350 million years old and they are increasing in the oceans because the temperatures are getting warmer and it's becoming more acidic. So there's always some kind of dialogue happening with the iconography in my work. So these are just a few other paintings showing birds in particular for me are a symbol of freedom and also we have lost half of the birds species on our planet. There was a study that came out last year 2022. That's a very sad fact. So if you hear birds just make sure you're appreciating they're still there. And then there's this piece which also shows a species of bird that has to do with climate change. This is called a veery thrush and the scientists were noticing that they were having larger clutches of babies and they were leaving their habitats to migrate sooner. And so they wondered why and they looked into it and they went back 20 years and realized that these birds were predicting horrible storm seasons. So they compared it to the computer models of scientists and found out that the birds were actually predicting storm seasons better than the climate change models were. So obviously nature knows more than we do. So now I would like to move away from some of my bird paintings. You can see more of them on the internet on my website and talk more generally about how we are or should be entangled in the natural world. Specifically in this talk I want to focus on three things deep time the Anthropocene and our emotional response to the environment. So first I want to discuss this idea of biophilic connection. In other words where do we stop and where does nature begin? Activists in France recently are quoted as saying we are not defending nature. We are nature defending itself. So I am going to click through a series of my photos and some of my artworks as I read to you a passage from an interview that I had with Yale University PhD student Sarah Pikman who asked me how my work encompasses this idea of place and time. Our world is a living history that can be contemplated on both the micro and macro scale. A flower for example may only live a few days but the flower has in its short lifespan a physical record of light and water turned into sugars of insects that may have chewed on its petals of hail storms that may have tattered its leaves. It also has a history of successful adaptation and genetic transfers of millions of years back to the first successful evolutionary leap of photosynthesis. A garden as another example is a collection of these successes all expressing their beauty and function. The garden also carries in its history the season from seed planted to fruit borne to decay and the recycling of nutrients back into the soil. Forests are the same kinds of collections of memories and history as our oceans, beach sand, stars in the sky, birds, trees, our own bodies. This idea can be expanded to every living thing on earth past and present. So where is the boundary of a place? I would argue that there is not one. Thinking about gardens and forests as places rather than things carries with it a destination, a location, a history, a shared common network and a co-evolved familiarity. Where are the boundaries of the ocean if one thinks of it as a place? If the boundary is simply the ocean edge then what do we make of storms that carry the water inland? How far does the beach expand in time if one thinks of it as a place within history? Is not the sand also the mountains and riverbanks from which it was whittled and the winds and waters that pummeled it into the tiniest of granules? I don't know why that slide needs to be dramatic and like come in to slow, you know, position. I've tried to change it and it just wants to be in that way. So we're just going to let it be covered. Okay so this idea of time expanding in space and of all lives being part of this long exquisite intelligent evolutionary process is one of the ways that we are entangled in our world. We are not separate from it in any way. We are co-evolved and share boundless connections both seen and unseen. And this idea of this expansion both in time and in space is a theme that I'd really like to explore in my work and one of the pieces that exemplifies this is this piece of monument. So here is monument. It is currently on display in Chicago at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. That is where students are getting PhDs and determining to move forward to make public policy. And on the right in this picture you will see the doomsday clock. You may have seen this in the news recently or made fun of on late night TV because of this photo. It's a very stern photo of people that were in front of it. But the doomsday clock is a symbol. It's actually an artwork that was created by the wife of one of the men who worked on the Manhattan Project. So that was the creation of the atomic bomb. And they wanted to create a symbolic artwork that communicate this abstract idea that we were about to annihilate ourselves. That there were there are so many people working together every year to assess the threats of the doomsday clock and how close we are metaphorically to midnight, including nuclear war, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, all of these different things that could possibly annihilate us. That's what's represented in this clock. And we've been as far away from this as 17 minutes after the Cuban nuclear crisis, Cuban missile crisis, sorry. And then we've been as close to it as we are now, which is 90 seconds metaphorically way from midnight last year. It was 100 seconds. So we have gotten closer. And what I love about this picture is that my work, this piece that talks about this aspect of deep time and how we relate to our history on the planet is next to another artwork that is talking about these political ramifications and how we all need to work together globally as a people in order to avoid destroying ourselves. The work itself, this is it in Weinberg Newton Gallery in Chicago. It's made up of very, very specific materials. The moss is a species that has been on earth for 350 million years. It doesn't require any soil to live. So it's out competed a lot of other plants that do need soil. It only needs water and air to survive and it can go dormant for a very long time. So that is in there. And then also the orchids. Orchids have survived the last extinction before the one that we're in when the dinosaurs were wiped out. So any species of orchid that you see right now is one of the five families that lived through that oblivion, which is pretty amazing. And then of course, there is the plastic. There is this kind of post apocalyptic, but also this kind of charred tree looking form in the center. And it is made out of high density polyethylene plastic. And it represents time for human beings of what we use as a material of plastic for a few seconds, a few minutes, a few days, a few years, but it lasts for about a thousand years. So this is another image of what it looks like when you're looking down on the piece. But what you can't see in the work is what's in the air. When I installed this work, I had a vaporizer that was exuding this fragrance that I've been obsessed with since 2018, which is the smell of rain. Many of you have heard me talk about it obsessively lately. So rain or petrachor is the scent that you smell after a dry spell. And the rain, when you smell it strongly, it's when gentle rain comes and will kick up the dry soil. And what it's doing is it's aerating the soil and it's releasing this chemical that comes from this soil bacteria called acetomyosis. Acetomyosis has created this chemical signal so that it could attract arthropods. And this is a much bigger picture than these actually are. These are very, very tiny little things that are crawling through the soil drawn to the geosmin, which is the chemical, which is cool. But the thing about it that is unbelievably amazing is that this process that these bacteria have been big, that they figured out, started 450 million years ago. So half a billion years, this smell has been wafting through the nostrils of all kinds of animals that have lived on this planet in different kinds of eras that have come and gone on this planet. And human beings can pick up on the smell of rain in smaller amounts than sharks can pick up on blood in the water. Why? Because it was our evolution, our need when we would smell rain would know that there would be seeds that would be sprouting, there would be fresh water, there would be a cooling sensation of higher temperatures, and it's embedded in us in a way. Like when we all have this response to the smell of rain, that's somewhat nostalgic from where we grew up because part of the rain smell has to do with the other things that are in the soil that are coming up when it's aerated. But it also has to do with this much longer story that's happened on our planet that connects us, not just to each other, not just to generations before us, but to other living beings, which I just find to be so absolutely beautiful. So I tried to make it. And I spent like two years in my studio with people running in every other day being like to make sure that I had gotten it right. And eventually after trial and error, I feel like I've gotten a pretty good handle on it. And I've created about four different regional varieties of it. So there's an original rain, and then there's an ocean version, like a Seattle smell, then there's a fall rain that has more of the decay, it's a little bit more masculine, and then no thanks. It's just a little bit more musky. And then there's also a spring rain, which has a little bit more of a lighter floral scent. And what's amazing about this, I feel like this is one of the pieces that I'm the most proud of, because everybody responds to it in their own way, and it very much becomes part of their memory. And it also moves through the world and has this really cool connection with the community as people smell it or talk about it. And it just, it goes beyond what I could put in a gallery. So it may be small, but it is mighty to me. Okay. So this idea of expansion and things kind of moving beyond boundaries is very well summed up by this woman, Robin Wall Kimmler. You probably have heard of her. She wrote Braiding Sweetgrass. She is a Native American writer and biologist, and she discusses this idea of life and time very succinctly. In her book, she talks about how the Western language, the way that we speak about nature is very different from the native language and how she and her culture speak about it. In the Western language, when we talk about nature, we use nouns, right? We describe it as like, that's a tree, that's a plant, that's an ocean, it's a thing. But in her native language, they use verbs. So it's not an ocean as a thing, it is being an ocean at the time. And before that, it was being a waterfall or rain or condensation or a river. It's in this state of movement and change and cycles, and it is in fact alive. She says that saying it makes a living thing into a natural resource. If a maple tree is an it, we can take up the chainsaw. But if a maple is a her, we think twice. And so this is really one of the big cruxes of my work. And one of the things that I think about a lot is like, where we're at right now, I feel like as a direct result of where we moved away from her line of thinking and where we moved to this, right? Where we see nature as separate, right? We don't see things as trees expressing this longevity of evolution and intelligence. We see it as resources of wood that can be turned into a chair or a table or whatever we need, right? Or we think about nature as this place that we go to, or we have a plant in our house, and it's nature in our house. It's not connected to us in terms of what it really is, which is that we're absolutely a part of it. As those activists said, we are nature defending itself. So I've been thinking about this. I feel like if we can figure out where we went wrong, maybe we can get out of this mess that we're in. And so as an American and looking back at American culture and American history, I have been thinking a lot about this idea of manifest destiny, which is the 19th century doctrine or belief that the expansion of the US throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable. And in this statement, there is a sense of entitlements and arrogance, ownership, and racism, right? This idea that we, and when I say we, I'm referring to the people that came here originally as settlers, are ordained by God to decide that this land is now ours, and we're going to divide it up into different parcels and pretty much just completely eliminate the self-sustained lifestyle that had gone there before, and also to see things very much as resources, becoming monoculture crops, things like that. And I wanted to respond to this with a work, so I created this work enough. I don't normally work with text. Text is a challenging thing to work with, so I'm good to do it really well. This is my first attempt, but I wanted to pick a word that could be set next to this, these two words of manifest destiny, because there's so much that comes along with the idea of manifest destiny that is percolated through our way of thinking in this country and beyond that kind of dictates how we think. Like we need more, we need things to get bigger, we need our economies to grow, we need our businesses to grow, every time it needs to get bigger and bigger, we take and take and take, right? The idea of enough is very different than that. It means that you have enough. It's this idea of contentment and satiety. It means that you have what you need and that you are allowing others to take what they need, that you can give to others. It's the opposite of greed, and it's the opposite of mine. It's also the way that the natural world buy in large functions, animals take what they need and they leave the rest and then they take more of what they need when they need it. We don't have whales going through the ocean, eating up a bunch of krill and then putting it in a storage unit so that they can access it later. They take what they need and leave the rest by and large. I wanted to explore this idea. I didn't want the word to be really super obvious. This is a mock-up on the left and then the beginnings of the work on the right. I collected a lot more sawdust than I needed from a sawmill in Boulder and then dyed it green, and then this is what the work became. It is a wall that's 18 feet wide, wraparound wall, it's 11 feet high, and it has two materials, really. The moss, which I've already told you about, which is this resilience, amazing species, and then sawdust, which is an example of a post-consumer material. It's what's left over after the tree has been turned into whatever resource we needed from it. The two materials in this work are in dialogue. The word itself is not very obvious, just like the idea of manifest destiny is not very obvious as an embedded part of how we think this country. As we would move around the wall, you would see it from different angles, and the word would somewhat reveal itself, which is really what I wanted to happen. The other part of this is that as you get close to the wall, it was sprayed a few times a day with the smell of rain. The moss would be soft and it would kind of billow out as you walked past it. There's kind of gigantic monolithic rectangular objects sitting in the middle of the gallery. It was a very kind of weird and disorienting thing to see, but also I liked that it took people a while to kind of enter the work to find the meeting. So I also want to back up a little bit to talk about the anthill scene, because I don't feel like we can talk about where we're at right now as a people without talking about the anthill scene, and it's very important right now, and it's what happened before how we kind of got to this idea of manifest destiny. So the anthill scene for those of you who are not aware, which probably most of you are, is an era. It is before the anthill scene, which is the current geological age viewed as the period during which human activity has been a dominant influence on climate and the environment. Before this we were in what was called the Holocene, which was 11,700 years of pretty stable temperatures on the planet. It was right after the last big ice age. So then we spiked in temperature, right? All these different things have kind of fallen apart, and the Anthropocene materials and the things that kind of define the Anthropocene are things like soil erosion, species loss, plastic pollution, the atomic bomb isotopes that are all around the planet from that. So there's this idea that we entered the age of humans literally, and I find this to be extremely fascinating and kind of freaky, because we as a species have altered the planet, much like an asteroid has in the past, to the point where we have decided that we need to determine a new age. It's a very political kind of hot potato also, because if we decided that we'd altered the environment, then that carries with it responsibility. And it could mean in a good way if we define it and say we did this, then other politicians and different countries will have to decide what we do about it. So it could add to policy decisions moving forward about the environment. But there's still a huge debate about whether or not we're in it and what defines the Anthropocene. So what you're seeing here on the right is a picture of what's called the GSSP, the Geographical Stratigraphics, something points, I can't remember, it's a big long word. They also call it the Golden Spike. So right now there are 12 places around the planet to examine to find the Golden Spike. The one, an example of the Golden Spike is when the dinosaurs were obliterated. I think it's in Tanzania. The KT boundary is dinosaurs, asteroid, and then mammals. You can see it in the rock. There's a definition. So they're looking at these 12 different places. There's a group called the Working Group for the Anthropocene, which are scientists working towards the International Geographical Society. But they're looking for this place and they're probably going to decide that it's happened in the last 150 years, what they call the Great Acceleration when things started a little bit haywire. But what I'm interested in and what I find fascinating is this paper. And there's a lot of papers like this where they kind of, they yoke this idea of colonialism to what started the Anthropocene. So this paper by Louis and Mazen was written in 2015 and they describe what's called the Orbis Spike. The Orbis Spike happened in 1610. And basically what happened is Columbus came to the Americas in 1492. The Columbian Exchange happened where goods and services and people were moved from Europe to the Americas and then to Africa. Goods and services were exchanged and then also a lot of people died in the Americas from famine, from war, from murder, from disease. And the population actually went from 65 million down to 6 million, which is 10% of the people that were on the planet at the time. There's a huge amount of people that died. And when they died, the crops grew wild and a lot of the land turned into forests. And when that happened over a period of a couple hundred years, it actually absorbed enough carbon dioxide to drop the temperature on the planet and create a small ice age, which is crazy. And so after that, it went back into the Industrial Revolution and that's where we're kind of looking to say, okay, the Industrial Revolution, that's where we replace the Anthropocene. But this paper argues that the Orbis Spike implies that colonialism, global trade, and coal brought about the Anthropocene. And broadly this highlights social concerns, particularly unequal power relationships between different groups of people, economic growth, the impacts of globalized trade, and our current reliance on fossil fuels. The reason that this is important to me and why I find this fascinating is because when you're saying a word like the Anthropocene and you want to include all humans, but only a small group of humans are really responsible for climate change right now, right? And this inception, this seed that was planted back then, it's a little bit rude and it's not right. And there's been some native indigenous people who have also pointed this to this paper and said that by linking the Anthropocene with Colonialization, it draws attention to the violence at its core and society is violently impacted by the white supremacist, colonial, and capital logics instantiated in the origin of the Anthropocene. The people who are suffering the most from climate change and habitat loss, are not the people who started this. They're not the people that see human beings as extremely separate from nature. They're the ones that are losing their land to permafrost. They're the ones that have to move their villages from the edges of the water in small islands. This is a very important way to look at how we are entangled in our history and how we define the Anthropocene. And we're literally about, they're about to decide it by May and this year 2023. So we'll see what happens. I don't think that they will pick the Orbis spike. I think they will pick the nuclear bomb dropping because that is a more measurable item. I just looked at my brother, the engineer. We had a discussion about this. But nevertheless, I find it interesting in terms of how I think about that split of humans and nature because I feel like that really is the root of where we could start to mend a lot of our ways going wrong. Okay. So I do want to show some works where I talk about plastics because that is a very Anthropocene kind of material. I feel like there's nothing different than plastic from nature because it lasts for so long. We use it for such a short time. When I was 25 years old, I wandered onto a beach in Thailand and I was a little hippie and I was like, oh my God, nature's so beautiful. I love it. And then I went to this beach and I saw plastics watching up from a cruise ship that was way off in the distance. And it was literally one of those moments, those punctuation points in your life as an artist where something kind of snaps and you change the way that you look at the world. It was no longer this idealized, beautiful thing. It was like, oh okay, there's also this. And my work changed. And this is the same area of beach in Thailand's 10 years later. And we all know that it's gotten worse and worse then. So I wanted to create a work that talked about plastic. People were really not grasping this abstract idea of a million bottles per minute in 2017. It was hard for me to grasp, but it was very much floating around the dialogue at the time when the plastic activism was really taking off. And I wanted to show people exactly what a million bottles per minute looked like for people that were there. A million bottles per minute being purchased. So I worked with the plastic company, recycling company, and they donated to me high density polyethylene plastic and we worked together and they melted it down into these wing molds. And then they also loaned me 87 million of these little tiny pellets. They're called Nurtles. This is how your plastic travels around the world, right? It gets to a place, they melt it down, they turn it into shoes or coatings for drinks or clothing, whatever. But they gave me 3.2 tons. Hey Adam. Adam, help me. So we installed this work in the armory. It was a huge warehouse. We cleared it all out and the entire thing is made out of plastic, including we lined it with the fabric that was plastic, the edge going from the edges, plastic. The pellets are six inches deep and I asked people to take off their shoes and socks and leave their phones because they didn't want anybody going like despair and then like hashtag, hashtag plastic. I wanted them to be really present with the experience that they were about to have. So I gave them each 250 pellets to carry. That represented, if one bottle with one pellet represented one bottle, then 250 of those represented what the average American purchased in 2017, right? So I told them that as soon as they stepped into the pit with their like metaphorical share, that the pit itself, if each bottle was one pellet, would refill every 73 minutes over and over and over again. And it really helped people see what their own decision, their own choice that they could make, how that fit into this larger conversation about what a million bottle purchases per minute really looks like. And so a lot of people had this experience where they contemplated their own responsibility. They talked to each other. I know that it deeply affected me and my own plastic consumption, even though I thought I was pretty good already. It definitely humbled me. This is a piece of Omega next to Monument. This piece changed and became Monument. And that for me was this really cathartic experience of having the work become something else and represent something so different than what it originally represented. My obsession with plastic continued to take me to the Arctic. So I went up there following plastic and we found it. We found it 700 miles from the North Pole. We gathered it on our ship and bagged it up. And then at one point I put it in front of a glacier to document it. Yes, that is in television. We found cups from Russia. We found things that were decades and decades old. And then I brought it back and it was, I installed it in my mom's meadow where I grew up. So this was really impactful for me too because it came full circle from where I started. And it represented all of these different things. It represented this material that had come from so far away. Now in the place where I grew up surrounded by these trees that had raised me. And they all have their own longevity and their own evolutionary story. And it was such a contrast to materials to have it here. It was really, this really amazing experience for me. And I also, of course, installed it at Redline. So now I would like to talk about our emotional correction. By now I hope that you understand how interconnected we are, how the language that we use matters, and how we frame our relationship with nature matters moving forward. There are a lot of ways to describe our sadness, anger, frustration, discontent, apathy in some cases, our emotions responding to the environment. We see it all the time in our backyards. I mean, Louisville burned down not too long ago. We see forest fires, floods. We see it on the news. We notice the changes in the seasons. And there are different ways to describe this. There's solistalgia, which is Greg Albrecht's term. He was referring to when you're in a place and it's changed, but it's still the same, right? So you're noticing that the seasons are a little bit different or that there aren't the same kinds of birds around, but it's where you're used to. It's just different. So you have nostalgia for a place that's still there. Then there's environmental melancholia, which is when we don't mourn something properly, we enter a state of melancholia because we're not allowed to actually grieve the death of something that's gone. And in the environment, there's a lot of deaths happening. They're relentless, they're overlapping, they're abstract, like how do you mourn disappearing bees or forest fires and all the animals that are obliterated in a forest fire? There's no way for us to have a process to go through that grief. So instead, we feel a little bit emotionally stuck. And in order to get out of that, typically what happens is we reach for something to make us feel better. And sometimes that thing can come from Amazon. And sometimes that thing contributes to the very cycle of what made us sad to begin with. And then we feel guilt and a whole host of other emotions. So I wrote a thesis about this in grad school, about this kind of cyclical repetition of not grieving and how that's feeding our problems. And then of course, there's eco-anxiety, which is the anxiety, the anxiousness that we feel when we witness what's happening in the environment. What bothers me is the pushback to us naming how we feel, finding ways to cope with how we feel, such as there's a class you can take at the University of Washington on eco-therapy. There's people that therapists are talking more to their clients about eco grief, that it's okay to be sad. It's okay to access these feelings. There's a pushback. And this particular headline by Laura Ingram really gets me. Teen activists should chill out over climate change. Love that. They should stop freaking out. I really don't like the fact that they're pushing back on this because to actually talk about our feelings and acknowledge that we have them is the crux of the most important part of how we move forward. It's part of redeveloping that language and reframing how we see nature. If we're sad about something disappearing, then that means that we care about the things that we're losing. Because if you didn't care, you wouldn't care, right? And so part of my works are about expressing that mourning and that loss. In this piece, this photograph was taken the night of the opening at Omega. And this spontaneous circle of silence happened. And people were grieving the feelings that they were experiencing over the loss and sadness and their own role. And the questions and all of the emotions, this happened. And it was very powerful. What I am encouraged to see is this. This is actually a memorial for the Okeechul Glacier. I hope I'm saying that right, in Iceland. And this happened a few years ago, but like 200 people came and mourned the glacier. It was declared dead by scientists. What's important about this is that this is animosity. This is seeing a glacier as a living thing. This is a different way of looking at the natural world than the destructive way that we've been looking at it. If you are told to shut down your feelings and not mourn anything and everything's fine, then that allows people to have you continuing as business as usual. You'll feel better. Just buy something. Just don't pay attention. It doesn't matter. It feeds the machine, right? This is a way to stop and actually pause and have reverence for this interconnected web that we are actually a part of. It brings us back to being part of this huge, amazing, elaborate, evolutionary story of animacy. And this brings me to the final piece, which is why I'm here. This work right here. I'm going to tell you a little bit about this work. So these two works, Everything is Fine and Dear Future, are connected, obviously. It started off with Everything is Fine. I was working with some teenagers at Platform and I asked them during actually the exhibition with Omega, I said, I'd like you to write letters to adults. I want to know how you feel about what's happening in the environment. This is before Greta Thunberg and Teen Activism. I wanted to give them a way to express themselves. And so they wrote letters and the letters were amazing. They were so informed and they were so intelligent and they were angry but they were hopeful and they had ideas and it just completely blew my mind. And so I expanded the project. I found something very special with somebody writing it down. So then I went to the Arctic and I asked the people on the ships who had seen these changes with the glaciers on the tours that they were doing. They contributed. I had no a scientist that I had worked with contribute. And then it expanded to artists. It expanded to engineers. It expanded to teachers, people, students, kids, my friends, kids. Then it showed in Chicago and then people were coming through and writing letters in different languages. And all of a sudden I realized that I had 300 plus letters, which are the ones that you see here. And what I really like about this piece is that to me, it's an archive. It is this amazing place where it shows a kind of cross-section of where we're at right now. It has all different voices, all different ages, all different backgrounds. And what's cool about it is you walk up to it and you can read somebody's intimate, private, very vulnerable, uninterrupted thoughts. Some people are apathetic. Some people are angry. Some people are fearful. There are teenagers on this wall. There are six-year-olds on this wall who want the world to be better and they're determined to make it better. There are eight-year-old people on this wall who are remembering how beautiful the world is and they're excited for the use. There are some people on this wall that have given up. This is the broad spectrum of how everybody's feeling. There's no mediation in this. There's no attempt to make it seem like it's all going to be okay. That's not the reason for this wall. This wall and the subsequent film, it's an archive. The film itself came from that letter, which is also right there. It's split into parts, which I really love. Written by a friend of my name, George Perugio. And when I was first installing this work, I was reading his letter and his letter was everything on this wall. It was every single... It just kind of ran the gamut. I'm sure if you've watched the film, you could hear it. He's writing to the future, but really who he's writing to are his two young boys. And I liked it because he wasn't trying to apologize or he wasn't trying to mediate himself. He wasn't being dishonest. It's a very honest letter. He's like, I'm sorry. I don't know what to do. I am remembering all of this beauty. These are the things that I'm seeing. These are all the wonderful things in the world and I hope that you get to see the same things. The point of the film is it exists on a continuum. It's part of that lineage of time that my work talks about. It's part of this baseline, right? Shifting baseline syndrome. What we know now is not going to be what the future generations know. It's not what our grandparents knew. It's not what my parents knew. It's shifting very quickly now. But is this letter, this wall of letters and this film, is it going to be something that we can look at and say, okay, that's when things changed? Then we moved on to different letters that had different messages. Or is it going to be something that we continue to grapple with for a little while, right? Or is it going to be something that changes to get worse? I don't know. I'm not trying to say that I know. I'm interested in capturing the archive of where we're at now because it is that honesty and the ability to hold two different ideas at the same time that I'm interested in. Yes, things are going to get worse. Climate change is going to get worse. But and there are a lot of people that are working very, very hard right now. And people that are writing letters like these that believe that something better can come from our better angels, right? The thing that I really don't like is apathy and nihilism. I really don't because I feel like with apathy, you are literally turning your back. You're saying nothing means anything. And you're turning your back on all the things that are alive right now, all the people that are working really, really hard, you know, there are a lot of people that are tackling these big challenges. What I instead like to think about is this idea of hope and we're not coming from a place of idealism. I'm very realistic when I look at climate change and what's happening. But what's inspiring to me is that life itself is hope, right? The very fact that we're all here, the very fact that we see these examples of evolution and success is the spark of life. It really is hope. Jane Goodall wrote a book about hope and she mentions this fact too. That there is always a way that life struggles to find a way through that challenge and finds the opportunity. It figures it out. The seed that is born after the forest fire is an example of hope. We have that in us, right? So I try to live my life every day looking at the reality but also contemplating and thinking about trying to cultivate this idea of hope. So I'd like to sign off by saying you should look at where is that letter right there. It was written by, it's the one on the left, it was written by my friend Alex on the ship and this is how I'd like to sign off tonight with hope, earnest, outrage, and less. So does anybody have any questions? Well, first thing, it's beautiful. Obviously, you look a lot better than I thought it would be. Thanks. So I appreciate your mindfulness and your work and the conversations that you ignite. One of my questions is how does someone take the mindfulness and the attention that you bring as a part and to you too and how do you change that into solution-based action? Okay, that's a good question and I wanted to save this part for the talk. When you just talk about the emotions and you talk about like, you know, thinking about how bad the things are and like, you know, getting into your emotions and being sad and dealing with that and processing that, you can get stuck in the sadness. You have to have a way through that. So one of the ways that I have found through my work is spending a lot of time in nature and doing things that actually remind me of the wonder of the world. That's absolutely part of it because that's an energetic flow that keeps me going. And then there's also things of like, for example, recently I went down to Mission Wolf. Do you guys know about Mission Wolf? It's this great place down in West Cliff, Colorado, where they have a sanctuary for different wolves. Their mantra is education versus extinction. And what you can do is you can go there and you meet the wolves. You learn that they're not these scary animals that are, you know, terrible predators. They're apex predators, but they're actually a very important part of the tropic cascade and ecosystems. So they teach small children all kinds of people about the importance of these animals and then at the same time, in order to have a visit with them, you need to participate in doing something to help Mission Wolf. So when I was there, all of these, this flood of the century, which seems to happen all the time, knocked down a ton of their fences. These torrents of water came down and obliterated all of the fences and enclosures that these wolves were in. So we spent an entire day and a half building these fences up to help the animals. Things like that. Active actions. When you find one thing or many things where you can be a part of something greater, even though you might think it's small, like that's not going to do a lot globally. But I think we can get overwhelmed by things that we have to do, these like big, massive, global, you know, gestures. Something like that is very important. It's part of this movement of people that's trying to make the world a better place. And then of course, there's always, you know, the typical things like, you know, eating less meat, eating less fish, driving your car less, not using as much plastic, and also talking about things. But a scientist from NOAA told me that he was ahead of global monitoring it. NOAA told me the most important thing that you can do to change things is to vote. If we lose our right to vote, we lose our voice to make policy changes. That literally is his top thing on his list, having witnessed everything that's happened in our climate. Vote. Is that helpful? Any other questions? Yes. Another question? I have a follow-up. So a lot of your work, you're taking recycled materials. Can you talk about the use of sustainable practices within the art world to be most unsustainable industries that you found that transcends into? Great question. So one example of my own changes that I made in my work is when I transitioned from making those resin paintings that are liquid plastic into not using them. I was using liquid plastic in order to point to plastic, right? And then when I went to the Arctic and saw the plastics, I had moved that far to the North Pole. I came back and stopped making those pieces. And much to the chagrin of the gallery that I was working with that was selling them because they were very, they were nice pieces and they sold well in the market, I just decided that I couldn't participate in doing something like that anymore. So instead I worked with recycled materials. I made a film. I started making work that had less of a footprint. I also recycled my work into new work. So the example of Omega being that large piece, being recycled into the new work rather than finding new materials, which I very well could have built an entire new thing around that. I moved things from one thing into the next. I also work with materials like sawdust, things that would normally be thrown into the landfill. My work has gotten a lot smaller, like in my studio. And it's, I mean, my students are here and I'm always like, make work, but I don't make that much work anymore. I really, I have to, I think about things a lot and a lot of my work, like the perfumes, you know, that's something that I feel like moves through the world. It doesn't have to be this giant grandiose thing. And I wait and cultivate ideas until they're very much solidified to make something new. I don't make a lot of paintings anymore. You know, I make graphite drawings on paper, things like that. So I think that artists are very much on their own personal journey into what materials they're working with and where they arrive with their own materials. But the art industry is a very destructive, consumptive industry. And one of the things that galleries are doing is they're joining, what's the name of that corporation that we were, that we were talking about? It's a group of galleries. Oh, it's called Galleries Commit. It was started by two, two, one friend, but his friend too, out in New York, where galleries actually subscribe to a promise and they hold themselves accountable to make sure that their carbon footprint is less. They figure out how much shipping materials are going in and out, and they, like, house are in worth as one of the galleries, the major galleries is on it. They document how they're making incremental changes to be more responsible, which is nice to see. So that's another part of the industry-wide place that we're trying to tailor. Yes. You talk about some of what you've done with scientists, like I mean, Bo, I think you went into the Svalbard, some artists, scientists, tell us about some of that collaboration and what you hope to see in the future. Okay. Yeah. So when I went to Svalbard, I initially was going to study plastics that were moving north on the thermo-hailing current, and I was also interested in this little tiny algae called Emilia-Nia-Huxley, which is part of the food tropic cascade in the oceans. And it's also, when it dies, it releases a gas that nucleates clouds. And so there's scientists that are studying how the cloud formation is actually a response to bring the temperature down to the planet. It's the theory of Gaia, the love lock hypothesis. So I met with scientists to talk to them about these different kinds of allergies and also dimethyl sulfide, which is a gas that they use to measure carbon dioxide exchange with the ocean. It doesn't matter getting too technical, but I met with them first to get a lot of information. And I was thinking about incorporating dimethyl sulfide into my work, because I was like, oh, it's this ancient smell. Everybody will love it. And I went to smell some of it at NOAA because they had some tanks that they were about to put on a ship. And he was like, I don't, he's like, if you release this in the gallery, it's gonna, they're going to call the fire department. And I smelled a little bit of it and it smelled like band-aids, vomit, and feet all together. And I was like, I can't do that. So I eventually moved to rain. But yeah, they were just there to kind of help inform me about what I could experience there. And I read 35 scientific papers before I went up there. I had big plans. And when I basically sat on the ship and was completely in awe of the landscape, and I drank tea, and I just watched. Bye. It was a very amazing experience. Yes. Talk about rain. That's different smells from different areas. Yeah. Explain it to me. I can explain it to you. Yeah. Sure. Oh, sure. Yeah. Thanks, Paul. So rain is comprised of geosmin, plant fatty acids, ozone, and some esters that are in the air. And so if you're in the Southwest, for example, there's different plants that are growing. Like, I have a friend who told me that I should include this smell of creosote because that's a plant that grows in the Southwest. And when I smelled it, I didn't recognize it. It didn't, it didn't affect me in any way. So I didn't include it because I didn't know how much of an amount to include in it. So the work is very much a personal work, I guess. I have experienced the Seattle seashore kind of smell and also the East Coast smell. So I incorporated both of those. But it's what plants are leaching into the soil. And then if there's a thunderstorm, you might get a little bit more of that ozone smell as well. And if it's close to the coast, you might get some more of that salty air because that's already in the air itself. So that's what makes up this chemical concoction smell of petricor. Thank you all for coming. I appreciate it.