ARTIST STATEMENT

Bridging our region to an interconnected conversation on the climate…

The ongoing climate crisis is the defining issue of our time. Following a year of unprecedented records in global temperatures and severe weather events, honest and empathetic dialogue on the issue has never been more urgent. But given the complexity of climate change, and the onslaught of many different data representing different facets of it, many people are at a loss for ways to enter the dialogue. For this, we need artful expressions that capture the interconnectedness of the climate narrative and illuminate the network of forces that shape our world in real time.

The myriad factors that constitute the climate crisis make it intrinsically challenging to connect with, to feel.

A voice for the climate on a canvas at scale…

A public artwork can offer a license to feel something about climate through the experience of the work, and perhaps deepen a relationship to our ecological oneness; the factors we drive, the factors that drive us, the resulting environment we have both created and are subjected to.

The scale at which such an artwork is registered relates to the challenge many face in discussing, addressing, and comprehending the climate. It would be suitable, then, for a climate-based artwork to be realized at a massive scale—viewable from great distances, from nearby neighborhoods, from air, sea and land.

For our region, there is one canvas that rises to this occasion: The Tobin Bridge.

This work confronts the incomprehensible nature of “climate” as a whole, or better yet as a hyperobject. Rather than attempt to describe or illustrate the details of such, the artists’ design for Illuminated Tobin compiles a variety of inputs and demonstrates the various ways they affect one another. The artwork fields real-time data from raw climate metrics and economic factors to analysis of human-produced objects (news reports and climate studies).

The artwork does not intend to describe a certain or even many data streams accurately, nor does it intend to illustrate a particular viewpoint or politic. Rather, this artwork is centered at receiving a broad spectrum of climate related inputs, dispassionately, and then creating a method through which they influence each other on a grand scale seen through light. It will be an abstract work of art, but it will be grounded in a logic of climate and related data, tuned by the artists to produce a dynamic, beautiful artwork at the scale of the Tobin Bridge. 

Viewers might notice layers of color, rhythmical motifs, repeating expressions, variations and extensions of patterns. To find patterns and recognizable evolutions in the artwork would be, in a way, to see them in our climate. To see a pulse, a liveness, an indication of movement, to perceive order or disorder—all this would be perceived in the eye of the viewer.

Rather than claim a description of climate change, the work attempts to register all these layers of rhythm and relativity in strokes approaching the enormity of this moment in our climate crisis. It is less concerned with understanding directly and more with imagining that one can feel indirectly. This feeling-sensing, at times, may allow us to deepen our empathy to one another and the climate.