The following is an interview between Brooke Lanier By Paula Cahill:
PC: I’m excited to see your upcoming exhibition, Unintended Consequences. Can you explain how the images in Unintended Consequences relate to the landscape historically?
BL: I see these paintings and photographs as part of a larger art historical lineage that began in the mid-1800s and is still very relevant today. For instance, the Impressionists made paintings that are now seen as merely pretty, colorful, and imbued with beautiful light, but if you look at their subtext, the diffused light and color were caused by extreme air pollution from the industrial revolution. Likewise, the landscapes in the show are quite beautiful and serene on the surface, but they depict the continuing aftermath of industrialization and human impact on the environment.
PC: How are the artists addressing climate change in Unintended Consequences?
BL: Jennifer Manzella’s prints of abandoned industrial building facades along the Delaware and Hudson Rivers are the first images viewers see when they walk into the show. They imply the environmental impact of industrialization. Diane Burko’s photographs from the Arctic Svalbard as well as Greenland’s Ilulissat Glacier and Ekaterina Popova’s watercolors of Skagaströnd, Iceland, depict melting ice caps in the Polar regions. Moving south, Geoffrey Agron’s photographs and my own watercolors depict shorelines destroyed by hurricanes and tropical storms. These are increasingly impactful, intersecting phenomena for densely populated coastal areas that are being developed at the same time that melting polar ice is causing sea levels to rise.
PC: How has climate change impacted your own work?
BL: I was making more theoretical and abstract work until this past January when I visited my grandmother in South Georgia. I had the opportunity to explore the coastline and marshes from southern Georgia to Jacksonville, Florida. Exploring eroded dunes in terrifyingly disorienting fog and tromping as close to the edge of the salt marshes as I could get without sinking in, I witnessed the destruction, change, and extreme erosion that hurricanes and tropical storms have wreaked onto the landscape during recent years. I began to focus on the environmental impact of these events and the interaction between human destruction of the wetlands and the development of desirable beachfront communities. To accommodate mass development of coastlines, flood plains and wetland areas were paved over, decimating an important source of natural flood control. An ever-increasing coastal population means that the impact of the storms on humans is much greater since so many people lose their homes and businesses. After seeing the immense impact of the hurricanes, I came back to Philadelphia and completely changed what I was making.
PC: It sounds like you had a deeply moving response to this experience and that your work became more personal as well as more focused on social and environmental change.
What would you like people to take away from Unintended Consequences?
BL: These images deal with the beauty in the details, but they evoke the sublime: a feeling of being very small in the face of something very immense and powerful like a storm, the climate, or how tiny one is compared to a glacier. I hope the viewers will think about their place in the universe.
Unintended Consequences, May 5 through June 5, 2018
Opening Reception, Saturday, May 5, Noon to 3:00pm
Artist Talk, Tuesday, May 15, 5pm
201 South Camac Street, 4th Floor, Philadelphia, PA
*For more information: brookelanier.com or brooke.lanier@gmail.com