Atlas of the Disappearing

Abstract

The idea of loss and disappearance as it relates to the natural world and the climate crisis is a paradox: even as science proves the ecological threat is both intimate and universal, that very threat essentially becomes abstract. Reflective of this existential duplicity, all of the paintings in this body of work are large, abstract diptychs. My art practice embraces the necessary diametric experience of nature and climate cataclysm in order to offer pathways of understanding, collective mourning, and conceptual adaptation and reevaluation. I use both lyricism and abstraction to conjure the inverted pain of only realizing the vast importance of something (in this case, life on earth as we know it) the moment it vanishes. The fragmentation of this awareness is demonstrated in the physical and implied layering in my paintings. Embedded topographies portray the concept of landscape as both the historical and the emotionally cognitive embodiment of anthropogenic damage. Beyond a means of navigation and documentation, this Atlas expresses the overlaid arrangements that comprise transforming landscapes. Looming shadows, ghost formations, cascading light, and torn paper cutouts conjure entities that are diachronically expressed—still fathomable and tangible while also being irretrievably lost.