 Hi everybody, welcome. Thank you for coming to CVA tonight. Thanks for joining us. How many have seen the exhibition already? Good, good, great. Well, welcome and welcome to all your newcomers. We hope you spend some time. They've submission. I'm Melanie Finlayson. I'm the gallery manager here at CVA. And I was also given the great privilege to curate this exhibition called pressing for change. Pressing for change celebrates various ways that printmakers provide an accessible voice for change through a variety of approaches. The artists in this exhibition investigate the state of the vulnerable world and these printmakers inspire action while exploring relationships to community land and the environment. And I do want to take a moment to thank Cecily Cullen, our talented director and curator who listened and trusted me and guided me through this curation process. And to our whole CVA team and staff, the students, I couldn't have done it without you. So thank you very much and Jenna and Katie. So thank you all for your support. And a special thank you to the 10 amazing artists in this exhibit. And I'd like you to have Susan Campbell with us tonight. I do need to start off with a few other little housekeeping things. MSU is an off-campus art center for the Center for Visual Art. And then we're the Center for Visual Art and we act as a resource for students in the broader community through contemporary exhibitions of local significance and global reach. We have an immersive education program and a workforce development program for students interested in creative fields. And I also want to start out by giving our land acknowledgement recognizing the indigenous communities that originally inhabited this space. The Center for Visual Art acknowledges the privilege we have to gather in this place. Once the territory is in homelands of so many indigenous peoples, including the Arapaho and Shia nations, we respect the many diverse indigenous peoples still connected to this land and value the knowledge systems they have developed in relationship to their lands. We understand that offering a land acknowledgement either 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 the spatial relations, relationships of indigenous communities to lands, we recommend visiting native-land.ca and exploring the interactive map. CBA is connected to MSU Denver and supported by the university, but our exhibitions and additional programming are through fundraising. And one of the ways we do that is through memberships. So for all these students out there, if you're an MSU student, you get a free membership to MSU Denver, but you have to activate that. So we have students up front who are happy to help you do that, please do. And for all of our other guests that are not students, there are many different levels you can participate as a member. These funds help us offer these free access to these programs in evenings like this. And we have a few other awesome programs happening through this exhibit that I just want to touch on. I swear, I'll be talking in just a moment. The additional programs include this show is up through the 23rd of March. And then February 21st, we have an artist panel discussion with John Hitchcock, whose work is behind me here. Karen Kink and Raymond Munez. And then on February 29th, the collaborators die in fine tomorrow. We'll also be giving an artist talk. And on March 20th, we have a culture club, which is CVAs are making happy hour and all those events you can register on our website, please do. CVA also has a paid internship, so you might see those folks that are happening in the classroom right now, you might see them wander through. That runs through the academic year. This is a teen paid internship where teens learn about creative fields. And they're sitting fashion this year and they'll have a fashion show on March 15. Cool. That was all that housekeeping stuff. Now I get to do the best part, which is I have the honor of introducing a friend and mentor Susan Gothel Campbell, who is a multi-decl dictionary artist based out of Metropolitan Detroit. Her work considers the engineered environment as a natural process, the integration and erasure of human agency over broader global systems as a concept central decisions practice. Her work is realized in several formats in this exhibit, including prints, drawings and installations. Susan has been exhibited internationally in Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Slovenia and throughout the United States. Museums that include Susan's work in their collections and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, New York Public Library, Yale University Art Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Detroit Institute of the Arts, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation Toledo Museum of Art and University of Michigan Special Collections Library. Susan has taught studio art at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, including faculty on both Cranbrook Academy of Art and College of Creative Studies. And she's been visiting artists at numerous institutions of higher education throughout the country. And I'd like to welcome her to MSD Denver and please help me welcome Susan Gothel Campbell, the CDA tonight. Hi everyone, thank you for coming out on this beautiful day. I have to say, I came from Detroit where there was snow, it was cold, I haven't seen the sun for weeks. And I've been walking around for two days, and I remember to burn sunglasses. So it was a delight to put them on and walk around your great city. I want to thank Melanie for curating this fabulous exhibition, and I know some of the artists in the exhibitions. I don't know all of them. And I've just been blown away by the quality of work here and the concepts behind the work. It opens up a different dialogue because of bringing all this work together. And also the staff at Center for Visual Arts and Ceciline Collin, who couldn't be here tonight. Thank you so much. It's a real honor to be presenting my work amongst all these other fabulous artists. So as Melanie said, I'm from Detroit, and this on here on the screen is a milkweed galaxy from far away. There's a lot of material, so that is a bunch of milkweed flying around. There are several currents that flow through my work. And I found over the years, I have keep coming back to the same questions, but I find different ways to answer them. My practice is based on inquiries, is what I call them, or curiosities. And I had a great meeting with several students today in a painting class, and I encourage everybody whether you're a practicing artist or writer interested in the land around you to remain curious. I always keep that well honed because it will serve me to keep things moving in the universe. So some of my inquiries are how do we understand time? What role does science play in our daily lives? Is there another way to think about the built environment? What does adaptation look like? And how do I stay engaged with my local landscape? There's a wonderful book out called Curious Minds. Is anybody familiar with that book by Perry Zung and Dan Massett? It's a wonderful read, and it talks about the science of the brain and the science of curiosity. And what I found so compelling about their research is that they're really boiling it down to a need to connect. They have this interconnection with networks. And I read the book and going, oh my gosh, finally, there's something that just really resonates. And it's going through science, but it's working with something that is really a community in all of us. I'm trained as a printmaker. And although I have lots of different mediums that I work in, I often return to printmaking. It comes naturally to me. I had a father who I didn't have much of a relationship with. He was a salesman. He was a paper salesman. And my parents divorced when I was young, but I did. I did just spend some time with him. He was on the road a lot. And after all these years, I realized I just absorbed how he talked about ink on paper. He sold paper to commercial printers. And he'd come home at night and talk about problems that he would have. The coating on the paper was too slippery or there was some adhesion problem. And I found, as a kid, I didn't think much of that, but I would listen to him talk about paper and ink. And I also was able to be the recipient of lots of cool paper samples. And he would bring home these sample books. Some of the papers had butterflies embedded in them. Just as a seven year old, I was just mesmerized by all this paper. And I went to a liberal arts college. I majored in art. At the time I went to school, you were either a painter or you were sculptured, sculptor, nothing else. And I never felt like a fit in that mold. The world is so much more open now to other disciplines. And for myself, I feel that printmaking is actually a major interconnection between all different fields. It can be painting. It can be sculpture. It can be digital. It can decimate information out into the world. So it really was a great landing place for me. I make traditional prints and I also do experimental prints. So this is an apartment lot in my studio. And I am known for a lot of experimentation. I'm in a building with five other artists. One's a photographer, one's a fabricator, two collectors, and they'll see me out in the parking lot. They'll go, oh my God, what's this doing again now? And of course, after Christmas, some people throw out their trees and I stored them behind the building. And I thought, when it's a little nice, I'm going to make them up. I want to see what they look like. So here are some giant Christmas tree prints. So because this is a printmaking exhibition, I thought I would enter talking about my questions, my curiosities through the world of print and how I have used an expanding concept of print. So I kind of broke it down into four categories. This is traditional prints, print as documentation, public projects, and print as object and multiple. This is a rack in my studio. Over the years, I have really pared down my practice to just printing off of wood. I don't even, you might call them woodcuts, I don't even carve the wood. It's so beautiful that I try to find a gesture in the wood, a grade that needs to be enhanced. And then what I do is ink that wood up and I print color fields. Or black and white. Black and white, this is a piece of birch plywood that I've used over the years. Because it has this beautiful, what I think of is almost a serious cloud. I reuse my wood time after time. And if I show you back, I have little notes on the sides of my boards. And I might, so I can remember what it was like. It was like, I might have looked at the pull-up of one of those boards for two years and I have one that says it looks like the green flash. And instantly, I know what the green of that wood is like. So this is a woodblock print that is inspired obviously by aerial wood views of cities at night. And instead of, as I said, carving the wood, those white areas are from tiny perforations in the paper. So I work in a reductive manner where I remove the paper with a small tool that's actually used in bookbinding. It's a little Japanese screw punch and it's used to pre-drill labor so you can sew it. I find it's a beautiful drawing tool. So one thing I do is use tools for different purposes. Another aerial and this is from flying out of New York up the coastline when I travel to Europe often. And there was one evening where the weather was bad and we had to fly up along the shore for a long time. We couldn't go far and had long views of the window. So this is taken from there. Over the years, my work has vacillated between landscape as a picture and landscape as process. To keep reiterating something I see or trying to replicate it has not been as interesting to me. It hasn't fueled me as much. However, I always draw and I will be inspired by what I'm looking at and will make traditional drawings. But I keep asking, what more can I get out of this? How can I make it new? Why should I keep looking at this? And I have gone into the world of weather to look at atmospheric phenomena. I've worked with meteorologists, climatologists, scientists just purely to learn about their field. What I became so interested in was the weather data. And I've attended many air balloon launches. Look at ozone and lower left hand corner is actually a graph showing plume animation from a weather station in Texas where they would measure blowing dust or fires. And all this information that we're able to pull off the internet or search, I've been bombarded by it. But I also have used it as fuel for my prints. These are really early prints called winds aloft. And they're based on a cross section of the wind at higher levels in that atmosphere. Pilots will need to look at where what the wind is doing at certain levels. So I learned to read these charts. I also found them quite gestural and beautiful. So I'm not interested in you going, oh, wow, there's a big gust right there. However, these little F shapes, the more bars they have, it means the stronger the wind. So I do go in and out of science, real science, but I take a lot of liberty with using the images. So what I do is I try to find a gesture in the data. And so these early prints, they're very mechanical. You see the holes are perfectly round. I started to want to move away from that. And I then started to work with pictorial images of landscape. But I inserted the gesture of the data into the landscape in the sky. And because in a way, to me, this world of data and information to me is like an atmospheric phenomenon. So I wanted to present the data. You don't really know what it is. It could be a firefly. It could be lightning. I really like it to be ambiguous. And these are, these are maybe 12 years old. I worked primarily just in black and white when I was developing the series. I've worked in various institutions, sometimes I'm a visiting artist and I work with printmaking students. I had a residency at the University of North Texas and I worked with graduate students. And they wanted me to produce the print. In addition of about 24, my prints are edition four or five. I don't like to make a lot of prints. Also, they're very difficult to edition, meaning making more than one that looks the same. So you see how I work with ink and roll my ink out in a gradation. To get those black transitions, it doesn't happen in one pass. You have to layer transitions of black and tint it out like four or five times to get that. Then I had to figure out how to have these eight fabulous students that were waiting for me every morning punch holes in my paper. And I do it like a drawing. It's very, the decisions are made right then and there like you make a drawing and here I had to figure out a way to tell them where to punch the holes. So I made these templates and you can see the little tool there where they're punching the paper and then that went pretty well. They were a little puzzled at first, but they got into them. These are fairly recent prints. I moved into color right before COVID. I had a trip to the Bahamas. I went to this option and I'm over the holidays with my daughter. It was a very beautiful kind of bohemian place on the beach. This shows how I sandblast my wood. This is how I roll out my ink. And this is how I transfer the ink onto a sheet of paper and I use pretty much all Japanese hand ink paper. So the series lost cities. This first iteration is a set of 10 prints. And I just recently had a box made for the set. There's additions of five of these are smaller. There's two in this show. They're larger or more recent. I also like to work with objects. And while I was working with these prints, I kept thinking about how much. The news there is about climate and destruction and war and eroding shorelines with rising sea levels. And I thought, well, what's heavy and light because water is light and beautiful, but destruction is a heavy thing. So I made this flip-flop out of a cinder block. There's an artist in the show, Adriana. Yes. She's also used a cinder block, so it's interesting. We both are in that same process of metaphor for destruction built in there. Here's some of these prints. As you saw in that video, these are double layered prints. So I'm touching coals and then I print another layer underneath and attach them at the top. It's a way to get multiple color. Some of these are not any place. They're not a specific city. They are more of a compilation. I photograph a lot when I travel. Sometimes I use a template, but then I treat it as a drawing. So there might be like, I fly in and out of New York and I know the geography of that. And I fly in out of Detroit and it's very grid oriented. So when I find I'm in a new place, like if you're somewhere in Europe or you're in India, the cities are laid out differently. I mean, that's quite interesting. This is a more recent print on cities. I have a person I work with in Switzerland. His name is Tom Bless. And I just recently had an exhibition there. He changes over his print shop four times a year in the house as to the shoes. So I was just talking about water. I'm going to talk a little bit more about the opposite fire. And this is me working on a series of prints in Germany. I hadn't planned to work in color, but I did because I had my black ink never showed up. So it was a really hot summer and I found at that time the environment was so oppressive. I couldn't do anything but think about heat and throughout my past 20 years, I've really been interested in this phenomenon of urban islands. Do you know what those are? It's where there can be different weather patterns in cities because of how much pavement and buildings absorb heat. So you can have a totally different weather pattern in a city instead of the outline areas. And I find that phenomenon just fascinating and so much that we can work with building materials and things like that to change it. So this is a series that I did in Germany called the heat scapes. Again, I was saying I go back and forth between representation and abstraction, working with data and information. This is a show I had in Detroit. And this is more based on, we see that all the time in the summer especially where they use colors. Like you know how hot it is in that deep purple lavender. Oh, that's not so good. And so I make these prints that I mount on panels and I like to work with architecture. So this rammed the space of that gallery so they can be shown in different configurations. This is a piece called Sway. I was commissioned to do a piece for the cancer center in Detroit and I really wanted to think about levels. Levels like water, low being cool and then the higher up you go, it gets warmer. It's a beautiful facility. My husband died of cancer 10 years ago and I was just blown away by how thoughtful this new building was in treating cancer patients and how much they were creating a more humane environment that was sensitive to people and inspiring. So they had a big art budget and I was thrilled to have this piece in their collections right outside of radiology. These, a couple of these are in the exhibition. They're called aerial fire sky. The Colorado have fall from the Canadian wildfires. You've had plenty of fires here and you all know what the sky looks like when that happens. So last summer, those Canadian wildfires just I could not not deal with it. I could not not look. So I made a series, a new series of prints. And again, these are double layered prints. I can't remember which two are in this show, but they're there. I'm inspired by so many artists and over the years there have been people that have influenced my work. A couple of them, Agnes Dennis, her monumental works based on the environment of and Melchina especially. And I find this other work being done Mary Madeline is doing some interesting work with food floating in our arches and the Detroit River and Ellie Irons is working quite a bit with dyes and pigments. In 2009, a long time ago, I received a really generous fellowship from the Kresge Foundation. I can't tell you how much it probably all know, but when you give some support for your work, it just allows you to open it up. You don't have to worry about paying your rent or how are you going to buy these supplies just to have some funding to realize some of your project is a gift. And in 2009, I had this great fellowship and I pushed my practice. Because I'm interested in the weather, I decided to set up a weather station in this Elbercon building in downtown Detroit. I had a friend that had a graphic design business on the 22nd floor. And it had a little parenthood sales old dots down there where you could walk out and see the same almost from a hundred and eight degrees. I crawl out of the window and I go sit out there and I do little studies. These are the computers I made and I just do goofy things. So the other thing I started to do was to set up a webcam. I bought a webcam that took still images. It didn't take time lapse. It didn't take video. I was so interested in what was happening that is south of us Detroit where the Ford Rouge plant is a lot of industry there. As you know, it's a big car on board of this town. But there's also a lot of air pollution there and I wanted to start to record the sky. So, unfortunately, this won't play. I'm going to see. Yeah, we're just having such a good time with this one. Okay, here. All right, so this melody to walk around with this this video. So what I what I did for this project is my camera took a picture of this Detroit skyline every minute 24 hours a day 40 year. So I took all of those still images and worked with somebody with me that could help me. And they're compressed into a movie at 20 frames per second. I would change the location of the camera, the entire video. So I did a video that is called Detroit weather 365 days. This was in 2010. And to show the video, it's it can be long and boring. The data runs at the top. So you see the time the date. I cut when I show it, I split it into the unfortunate Detroit Institute of Arts Clones this piece. And when they show it, it's on two screens. And I split the seasons at the solstice so you can watch this kind of mesmerizing to watch this weather. But what was also so fascinating to me was there were things that happen. I love to just do straight observation, record things. Things show up that you don't if you didn't know you were looking for, but you find interesting stuff there. So I I showed this footage to some meteorologists I was looking working with and they said, oh my gosh, that's that's a fumulous cloud. I've never seen one of those in action. And what happens is the heat and torque from industrial emissions hold cumulus clouds overhead. And they hadn't seen that in the Detroit and they knew about it, but there it wasn't my footage. So it's that just that little snippet of that those moments spurred this whole other project for me. And I'm moving now into kind of public projects. I talked about this today. This is a cloud spotting Detroit guide I did. I'm so interested in having people pay attention to their environment just the Monday. So I use the format of the tourist brochure. I put these around in hotels and places where you might pick up something for a suit or a where to go golfing or where to take your kids. And it's basically documents. Manmade clouds and naturally occurring clouds in the city of Detroit. There's a map in there. I have led clouds by the tours of manmade clouds in Detroit. I have a real key that talks about the meteorological signage and how you signify cumulus serious levels clouds. But then I invented my own manmade clouds. I brought it down into the categories like Detroit has a number of steam tunnels. And so there's a whole category in this brochure about great steam spots. It's clean. It's I asked two friends to post for me in the middle of a busy intersection in the middle of February. And I just call them street spots. So I've got one. Dan just buried the graphic designer and the friend had just run a marathon. Car horns are honking standing in the middle of this intersection. But so the steam and I have a category called savory clouds. And that's where there's good barbecue and good street food. And then these are kinds of clouds that's industry. I try not to criticize. I just try to tell it like it is. Yeah, they're kind of. And this project also because of all the industrial. Pollution I was witnessing I started being curious like how do you measure? How do you measure air pollution? How do we know what's it going into the atmosphere? So I called up the state of Michigan. I get a lot of phones being hung up on me. No, I can't let you do that. But I found one person that said, OK, well, we have an air monitoring technician. I'll let you meet up with him. So I shattered this guy for three or four months. I went around to all the sites where he measures. Particular matter in the atmosphere and that upper left hand corner. It looks like a bunch of bird stations, right? So those are a little air. There's a little compressors in there. And you put a piece of paper in these compressors and it pulls particulate matter out of the atmosphere. This filter in the lower right hand corner was a piece of its glass spun fibers in these papers composed of that was in the compressor for 24 hours in southwest Detroit. And that grade is what you're seeing that is pulled out of the atmosphere. Kind of a poem. There's been a lot of pulmonary studies done in that area. So I didn't go just OK, that's interesting. I decided to do another public project. I've done three of these called dirty pictures portraits of air. And the biggest one I did, I was invited to do a project in Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh being an industrial city also has had air quality issues. It's getting way better. So they set me up at this art fair. Over the weekend, and I made packages with air filters framed like white paper. And I asked the participants, I gave them all a packet. I had 100 filters. I got 100 participants. And they asked them to put the filter in the place where they thought the air was dirty. This is not scientific. It's only awareness and it's only as a way to engage people with their local environment. So I took out a website posting over the year where they put their filters. And then I'm going to show of their influence. And there's a recording. There's a poem of this. The poem is all the locations where they put their filter. So when I love this really brown one, that's from a barbecue place near the meat smoker. And so the poem near the meat smoker over the hood of the car. The poem is called Air Moves, but it's just based on where people put their filters. So as I mentioned, I'm interested in ephemeral material. I do a lot of really, I do a lot of 10 material that is that changes over time. This piece on the right is a block of vandaline. A block that's additioned. It's a brick. It's called Seasonal Flyers Spring. This piece that I'm drawing is called Always Red. And I love to document change so that grass now is totally a beautiful golden brown in that piece. And it changes over time. I don't have documentation of it. Another area that I use a lot of order that I have worked with is grass. I've grown grass in post-consumer plastics. And the carpet that's up in the front is an example of growing grass and how the roots of the grass act as a print. And they record the contours of the plastic container. Here is an example of how I grow these. And wheat grass is fantastic. It grows really fast. It has a very strong root structure. The roots grow laterally and I build with these things. I make carpets. And when I'm done, I compost the work. Today's work grass pieces have grown in rotisserie chicken trays. They have quite beautiful bottoms. These are some stats. These are from Sushi Big Party Sushi Trades. This is the birth bone farm lettuce trays. So much about it in terms of its plastic containers. Here are some other carpets. I made the cities where I've shown them. One is Flint with all the water runs. And one up here is the Denver carpet. And then Chicago carpet. So the show that I had at North Texas, the University of North Texas, they invited me to do an installation. And then they said, would you like us to send the work back? And I said, I'll be in the garden. I'd love to compost it there. So I worked with, I came back. I came back to the University. And I worked with fiber students, a natural dye garden. And so we made new garden beds with my installation pieces. Those were in the gallery. And we then hear some of the, they were working with Indigo. They were some really great plants, but the soil was really pretty tough and dry. And the loneliness of the soil that I use was really good for remediation. So that was a great project. There's the garden. There it is, a road in the decaying. The last bit of work that I want to talk about relates to that game of the land. There's a book, a brick called Seasonals. And when I say that, when I'm heading that curiosity, I always want to know how do I stay engaged with what's going on around me, even if it's just a cease watching seasonal change. So I'm always picking up debris. I don't have a lot of that tree, but a photographer my studio does and there's always bringing me bags of black walnuts. So I decided to start making dyes with them. This is a really rich color. Some of you have worked with that. Again, I might start with just experimenting with mark making. And here I am just asking people to throw walnuts. Really ripe ones. Steve's had a mark here. I boiled it. You can hear my dog crying. He's so confused. So I use a lot of natural dyes that I've made. Actually, not a lot. I should restate that. Walnut is quite intense and colored like fast. I don't have to use a mordant. So I want something that is really rich. Walnut is one I use quite a bit. I also use a lot of eucalyptus with iron. This is a show I had at the David Klein Gallery. And Detroit, and I think both of these. No, maybe just the one of the piece on the right is in this exhibition. This one is here as well. So again, I use that little tool to open it up and perforate the paper. So light can pass through and I can get shadows on the wall. And then I really enjoy embroidery and hand-selling of these papers together. The last project I want to show you is something that I'm working on right now for an exhibition at the University of Michigan called Garden Repairs. And this is a very large piece. It is stained with eucalyptus, walnut, and iron oxide, as well as dyes. It has a lot of hand sewing in it and embroidery. There's no preparations or anything on here. But it's just become so important for me to be tied into these cycles of life and see that things need to decay and decline to refurbish soil. So I've been focusing on gardens. This is the piece in a show that will open tomorrow night. Actually in Detroit it's called Night in Garden. And I had a fabulous residency in the fall at McDowell in New Hampshire. I had a studio in the woods all to myself. And you have the option of staying in your studio. This micro place looked like an old Abbey or an old Catholic castle. And then I had this porch I could do these dyes on. So I was there September, October, and at night all these laws would come out and then there were spiders. It was kind of creepy at first and I befriended them. They stayed away from me. So I call this Night Garden and inspired by that moment in time. Again, this is Garden Repair. I've been growing sunflowers, loving watching how the pollen falls and the seeds fall. Again, these are one of the kind of works. They're large and they're two layered pieces. But the color underneath is a wood block. There's a little bit of detail of it. And these are made with that tool as well as an exact. And this is the last piece which has a lot going on. It's seen in hand sewing, all the stains. There's pieces, fragments of wood block prints and hand sewing. Happy to answer any questions or comments or are working in a similar manner or if you're interested to hear about the process. This question about your paper. I noticed that you sewed together quite a few. Somebody did the gallery here and you just showed me. But you walled forward and that was the same thing. Yeah. Piece of paper. Yeah. What drives your decision with your paper choice? Great question. Two things. It depends on maybe where I'm going to show the work. If I have the opportunity to large scale work, which the gallery, the David Klein gallery is a huge space, then I might decide to use a whole roll of paper. And if I want something to be really detailed, I may choose to assemble it. I love architecture and I almost think of sewing those pieces of paper as the way to make something architectural. I usually have quite a bit of paper around and I experiment a lot. But I've also now, I've worked digitally too. And there was a overall scene of a big scroll with the two other paper pieces. And I did a whole series of pieces. I've been shown a pin called High Biscous Years. And I tend to like bond with the plant for many, many years. And I have this High Biscous Plant that just is so prolific. It stays outside and dies back. And then in mid-summer it gets these blossoms that just scream at you. And they live for one day. And it just is a marvel every time I see this plant. I wanted to work really long in a long format so you could see all this change with High Biscous Flowers. I've saved them for five years. And I layered them on top of one another on a light box and then photographed them. And that's, I wanted it to be long like something falling. So I didn't want a scene, I didn't want an interruption to that continually. So that was... In this case, in your work, does it completely change the color? Oh, of course. Do you change the color? I don't know if it could be so small but the way they were dyed. If I saw the paper... Do you use the paper afterwards or prior? I dye the paper first. And then I try to find passages in the paper that are interesting to me. And then I'll put them together. Early on, the pieces, these pieces in the show here, they're largely mirror images. If you know, they're panels that run away. And I like this idea of almost a mirror image but it's still organic. And I'm getting away from that now but that's how I started. And so once I assemble them, then I start to look at what's happening. It's like making a water color to go out. Maybe I could open this up a little more. And as I said, I work in a reductive fashion. I've always done that. I've always drawn in by blocking things out or erasing. I do that physically with paper. Yeah. I have a lot of curiosity about the color and how it looks in this area. Yeah. I was just wondering if you'd like having a space to do anything. Yes. Such a great question. So I run it. I was just in Ian's class today. And I wanted to show something to our students because they're talking about place that I wasn't going to talk about tonight. And one of the series that I showed was this series based on an incinerator in Detroit. And I've also had a fascination with power plants over the years. And it got us. So I understand the pain of wanting to, you know, get into something. I've always been kicked off property. You know, the police have like, they'll call their security and ask me to leave. Cool. I mean, if you want to get into the plant or do you want to do something about the plant? I don't know. Yes. I just wanted to, I wanted to bother and find like one of the buildings. Yeah. As far as just the volume of the building that's in your house. But you can get to those and see it in far away. Yeah. Simply. Well, I can give you a couple of ideas. One, if you could get a webcam or something that you could zoom in or you could partner with somebody. So the hot project I did in Pittsburgh. They had a thousand dollars for me to do something there. They wanted me to project maybe my weather video on the side of a building. And I said, you know that? Okay. But you know, I'm really interested in what's going on in your city because it's so parallel to Detroit with air pollution. And I said, I had this project I've been doing with weather and particulate matter. I know you have some great organizations in your city. And one was the Breathe Foundation. So, I mean, as artists, I was never trained. You have to do your research. You do research and which I thought to do. So I made a move. I said, look, could I talk with somebody about maybe partnering? And they said, sure, we can do that. And then they said, well, we work with the Heinz endowment. That's the catch up. They have a lot of money for environmental projects. So I went to Pittsburgh. I had a meeting with a program officer and I brought documentation projects that I had done in Detroit and I showed him footage of my webcam from Detroit. And I want you to know there is a cycle air now that I used to follow. I looked in these are places where their webcam set up all over the country. That sometimes there are national parks. Sometimes there are urban areas, but it's purely to look at air quality. And I offered the state of Michigan to use my webcam to look at what was happening in the atmosphere around Detroit this fall in the month. We can't do that. That's off limits. So going back to Pittsburgh, the program officer said, oh my gosh, there is this co-complete down the valley that I can see from my office and they're not supposed to be running at certain hours, but I know they do. So they have the money. They buy three webcams and they start documenting what's going on with some of those plans. So just a suggestion whether it's for your own work. You just persevere, right? You just have to find ways to bring about awareness. I don't want to set people off at all. It's not my intention at all, but I want to work with people to bring about awareness. So the power plant, I don't know what else is around there. Is there a... Sure. Yeah. And is it, probably in views for years and years? Are there efforts to try to shut it down? Or is there just a power plant? Yeah. Keep at it. Any other questions? Process of remembering it down. It also helped that they're going to have a video in mind. Oh, that's such a good question. Because it is, as you can tell, my practice is crazy diverse, right? And the process of narrowing it down is largely my intuition. I might work with something for a year and it's not fueling me or it's too didactic and I'm not offering anything back to the person. I've made didactic work and I find creativity is energizing, but preaching and lecturing is not. And so I find if I can be stimulated and engaged with a project and it keeps me asking questions. Do you know the artist Ann Hamilton? Okay. She was in Detroit last year during a talk and I love her work. And she said something that really resonated with me. She said, you know, my biggest fear is that I don't have the right question. And that is so important to me. And so the research is research, but then I have to find the right question and I don't want to answer the question. I just want the work to propose a question. Because I just that's the inquiry, right? But I also have to be careful not to get so far out there that I lose the center of that kernel of what what the original impetus was for the work because I can just go off and left field and believe me I do that at this late age of mine. So I'm just going to bring it back. Okay, what was your original intention? I stay open and flexible, but I then also ask myself what is the best material to talk about this and that is why I'm constantly investigating materials. In fact, I was talking to somebody in your class Ann about, you know, if you're stuck doing doesn't have to be just keep moving and things coming when you're maybe you're not looking for them and I find that to be really helpful. Like if I don't know where to go, I might just go out and experiment with during COVID it was a really rough time for me and I wanted to be out in nature and it was hard to do that and I was alone and I was, I think other artists. I went out and I harvested a red twig dogwood one spring and my goal was to get in my car find a dirt road and get lost, just get lost and I would go out with my clippers and it was just so delightful to forget about this pandemic and I spent one whole winter learning to steam bed wood, red ocean and I wrapped my whole studio with red so it would record the rectangular shape of it. I never did anything with nothing. You know, I stayed in one stick and I spent months doing this but it'll leave some, it'll come back to me somewhere. Does that answer your question? Any other, one last question? Yeah, way in the back. Mine is yours. Anything in particular? Oh, wow. Yeah, I've been you know, the terrain is so different for me. It's flat where I am and I did have a reaction to empty buildings land not being cared for, I guess, like a lot of cement and this is such a beautiful landscape and I saw people, a lot of people with their ski bags and I'm thinking, oh my gosh this is, do you realize how gorgeous a vision of sun here and everything. So I think it's, my question is this is a beautiful place but you know how you're being cared for the urban area and the surrounding areas. That's all. That's my second one. And I've been to Denver for a while. Okay, yeah. Thanks. It was very interesting the way that you can present work because to me I feel like super architecture coded I'm trying to get as close to your style anyway. I tried to get close to yours. It was super exciting to see but I think one of the things that have you ever actually worked with architects in your design process and what do you think about the prospect of vegetation that's created by construction or the construction of new architecture because of the change of the ecosystem. Yeah, right. I would love to talk to you about this. So yes I have worked with if I were to go back to school I'd love to be an architect or environmental science or I mean there's so many fields that are interesting to me and I'm currently working with an architect right at this very moment or a hanging structure that I'm doing at the University of Michigan. So and I'm finding while in here I'm getting emails about specs and what's difficult for me is I can't see the material I can feel as a diagram but aside from that I find that there's not enough conversation between some of those fields. I did a project quite a number of years ago on a book called Zone and it was based on looking at the architecture of leaves, different leaf patterns, I'll have the branching, some are opposite some are really organic looking and I went and worked, I asked a couple of landscape architects if they, if I gave a big blow up of a leaf and I said would you please zone that's for how does the industry single dwelling homes and I gave them a choice of four leaves one was a cut sore leaf I think one was we got a maple leaf anyways all different branching patterns and there was one, I can't remember the name but and they were opposite and they looked at this leaf and said oh my god an engineer would do that I don't want to do that because it was just so they had these attitudes about each other's fields and I thought how should we talk to each other they had this idea but in terms of the building I'm very interested in that because we're, we've created this symbiotic relation to this environment we can't go back in time we have to find a way to work with structures that facilitate growth of life that is healthy for us healthy for individuals but also mindful of plants and animals they're not second class citizens we're all on this together and do you know the building in it's a kind of rain forest let's say Hong Kong or somewhere anyways it's a totally enclosed space and it has all these ecosystems but they're completely contained inside the building do you know which project I'm talking about biodome I was just reading about this and I'll look on the answer and what's so interesting to me about it is there it is it's a tourist destination because you have all these beautiful plants from all over the world that are maintained as controlled facility and they are stewards of the plants yes but then you also look at the labor force that is maintaining these and it's also in the long part of the world some of these so I wrestle with the dichotomy of creating some of the problems and having a totally closed system I don't know what to do about that I mean the coral there's a coral reefs in Florida that are dead they are now pulling them out of the ocean and they're going to maintain them separate from the ocean so do you have any ideas it is it's naturally occurring exactly yeah so these systems and I'm going to go back to that book about curiosity one thing that they talk about is how we really myself want for this interconnectedness with people on other fields and just with the environment compartmentalize things to the point where that's what I look for in my work and that's why I enjoy being people going into diverse practices thank you okay one more yeah I'm sorry I'm sorry I get on my bike and I have jars and I take one battle at a time and I twist it until it bangs inside the plastic container and all the fluff comes off and it takes me a long time but it's quite lovely and I always feel weird out there doing it but I gotta get over it so then there's no glue there's nothing there's no spray there's no fixative I have a container that I've made that's the size of a brick and it has a top on it and I shake it and it just kind of compresses and all of this is my fascination with ephemeral material so dandelion wants to stick together when you do that I've also worked quite a bit with milkweed and milkweed just wants to go through it and I've done pieces with milkweed and boxes and it's still pointing at those boxes and that's the nature of the material and I think it's so important to understand materials and it's fascinating to understand materials what they can do and what they can't do yeah so that's what I did there and there's very funny stories about the coffee anybody else thank you so much I've been really patient and thank you for coming out it's really special