For this final, I decided to do a project about climate change. I don’t see many artworks that revolve around this topic, and I think this should be represented more considering the state of our world. I call this artwork Road to Hell; hell is always depicted as a burning pit with nothing but pain and destruction everywhere you go. I created this dystopian scenario because we are in a world where if the sky turns orange, we have to keep moving on with our day or if we hear about a forest fire happening, we don’t react to it as much as we should because it’s not happening in our area. To ignore the warning signs is to doom our survival for future generations.
For this project, I was inspired by Jesse Treece's “Another Earth” and Wangechi Mutu's “The End of Eating Everything.” Jesse Treece’s artwork is simple yet whimsical. His collages are usually colorful and depict people or animals in different environments. Wangechi Mutu's artworks are more horrific in a way that makes people drawn to them. I intended to go with similar mediums Wangechi uses for her collage while making sure it doesn’t become crowded, “Using ink and collage on Mylar or paper, she combines humans, animals, and machines in seamless and commanding compositions full of small moments of discovery and random elements that may betray only an oblique relation to the overall image” (Wangechi Mutu Dresses Cultural Critique in Freaky, Beautiful Disguises). Since I started getting used to creating collages, I thought of cutting up magazines to create trees to add texture. Instead of making grotesque figures like Mutu, I thought about creating a forest fire scene to keep it straightforward because the event is already horrific for everyone involved.
I used acrylics, watercolors, and collages to complete this artwork. It was my first time working with acrylic and watercolor on a canvas, it was a surprise how well the watercolors blended in to recreate the orange sky we experienced. Using acrylic dark colors were okay for the ground but when I added lighter colors, it grabbed my attention like how a person would notice a fire from a distance. I think creating a dystopian scenario grabs people's attention because people don’t want to believe this could happen but then it did, and it will continue to get worse if we don’t do something. In Ana Mendieta's New York Times article; they wrote something that caught my attention about what fear can do in the natural world, “The New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that “if not naturally fearless,” Mendieta “used fear well, transmuting a profound sense of psychological and cultural displacement into an experience of merging with the natural world and its history through art” (Overlooked No More: Ana Mendieta, a Cuban Artist Who Pushed Boundaries - The New York Times). While fearmongering is a dirty tactic often used in the political scene, it can have a lasting effect on the public. Scientists have expressed the importance of global warming, yet some people don’t see it as a problem that should be fixed immediately.
Both people and animals suffer from forest fires whether they are caused by humans or climate change. I used black-and-white pictures to represent the victims, inspired by what Carrie Weems said to describe her photographic series. “Weems’s black-and-white photographs are like mirrors, each reflecting a collective experience: how selfhood shifts through passage of time; the sudden distance between people, both passable and impassable; the roles that women accumulate and oscillate between; how life emanates from the small space we occupy in the world” (Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems Landmark “Kitchen Table Series”). To the families who have lost their loved ones from forest fires, their memories of them will be like a black and white photograph. They live on in our memories, however, for the animals, their lives continue to dwindle due to human activity and climate change. One day; many of these animals will become a distant memory for us or a story to tell for future generations, who will never get to see one in real life.
This project took much longer to plan and do than the other three I did. That is expected for a final and there were times when I got frustrated, but the process was fun to experiment. I think Passing the Torch and Road to Hell might be my favorites because, at this point, I learned how to create my own style using collages. While I may have disliked it at the beginning of the semester, I learned how to adapt and find my own way of using it. Those artworks were created because of what is happening in the world and I felt the need to express it through art. I learned that I liked creating political art to show what I think and feel rather than expressing it through words. Sometimes it’s not enough to just explain how I feel so doing it in this art style is like my own form of therapy.
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