Betwixt and Between: A Climate Change Conversation among Artists

“Between the idea and the reality,” as TS Eliot famously intoned, “between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.”  The human world these days seems palsied—stuck in shadow—between dawning recognition and requisite response: people are at last beginning to sense that something is desperately wrong and out of balance in the human relationship with the wider natural world and yet still not quite ready to take the sorts of action, at the required scale, that might truly address the crisis at hand and, in so doing, assure a humane future.  To the extent that this palsy is a crisis in vision, to what extent might artists (whose very métier is clear seeing) yet help to cast light, as it were, into the shadow gap, thus waking us all up to how we have been sleepwalking and thereby helping to mobilize us to urgently necessary action?

Bridging the storytelling and observation illustrated in the previous Mana Contemporary show, This Land, and the upcoming installation, Implied Scale, Lawrence Weschler will moderate a conversation between Catherine Chalmers, David Opdyke, James Prosek, and Lauren Redniss.

CATHERINE CHALMERS

Engineer and artist Catherine Chalmers confronts the anthropocentric view of the world in her work. Her interdisciplinary works provide heavily researched and nuanced results that are also intimate and emotive. She considers the insects and other small creatures represented in her works to be collaborators, often raising the cockroaches and praying mantises that she photographs in her own studio. Chalmers holds a BS in engineering from Stanford University and an MFA in painting from the Royal College of Art in London. 

DAVID OPDYKE

David Opdyke is an artist known for his trenchant political send-ups of American culture. Opdyke’s political awakening in the early 2000s led to a body of work that confronts the horrors of contemporary America. His hyperreal topographical models of suburbs comment on mall culture and suburban sprawl, while his sculptures of ruined monuments mock imperialistic hubris. His work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, and the Washington Convention Center.

JAMES PROSEK

Artist, writer, and naturalist James Prosek published his first book at age nineteen. His work has been shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with solo exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the New Britain Museum of American Art, among others. Prosek won a Peabody Award for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler. 

LAUREN REDNISS

Lauren Redniss is an artist and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a finalist for the National Book Award, and an Artist-in-Residence at the American Museum of Natural History. She teaches at the Parsons School of Design. The latest of her colorful hybrid books melding drawing and reportage is Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West.  

LAWRENCE WESCHLER

Lawrence Weschler is the author of over twenty books of narrative nonfiction, most recently And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? (FSG, 2019). He is a former staff writer at the New Yorker, served as director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. His books include Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Pulitzer Prize finalist; and Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award.