Over 550 people have visited our Art + Environment Conference live blog. Click "replay" below to view the live blog archive.
Related links on the EMS main site:
Art + Environment web exhibition
Creative Contagion FLASHPOINT
The Conference included over 14 panels and events from 7 p.m. (PDT) Oct. 2 until 7:30 p.m. (PDT) Oct. 4.
Download PDFs of the conference schedule and panelist bios.
OCTOBER 2 - 4, 2008
NEVADA MUSEUM OF ART // RENO, NEVADA
We arrived at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno mid-day on Thursday . . .
. . . and they were expecting us--our seats are ready and the wifi is strong. We look forward to blogging the first session on Friday morning.
We met one of the Conference presenters, Michael Light, while we were viewing the current exhibition of his work ("Some Dry Space") at the Nevada Museum of Art.
This installation of Light's work (above) was accompanied by wall text (below) that includes the following sentence: "The classic American road trip is a kind of horizontal falling into possibility, away from known limits." Light's "Vertigo"--both its image and its text--activates themes, emotions, and sensations that we expect to experience at the Conference and on the "Testing Ground" field trip:
Chris Drury and Michael Light gave gallery talks tonight and each one left us with thoughts that we expect to build upon in the coming days.
Chris Drury ended his remarks with a stark declaration, softly spoken: the environmental changes now taking place are catastrophic. He references his experiences of creating his installation at Winnemucca Lake, what was once a lush, marshy wetlands area used by Native Americans until the late 1800s. The Lake dried up after the Newlands Project diverted its waters for other uses in the early 1900s, with severe consequences for the Paiute people who depended upon it and considered it sacred. Drury said it may already be too late to turn today's environmental changes around. His comment reminded us again of a sense we've been picking up while preparing for Testing Ground: that artists and scientists are being drawn to collaborating with one another now because they share a kinship. Scientist and artist each sense the urgencies and depths of the environmental "crisis" in ways that the recognize in one another.
During his gallery talk, Michael Light said his images of contemporary, altered landscapes are an attempt to insert modernity into geologic time and space. We're left wondering what this attempt by a contemporary artist might lend to our explorations during Testing Ground. It seems to call us to see ourselves as contemporary AND in the context of a moment that requires us to insert ourselves and work within a much longer sense of time.
