Donna Bassin
Environmental Melancholia | In this time of climate crisis when intervention is urgent and still possible, I have created a series of ‘memorial’ landscapes to injured and dying environments using visual metaphors to celebrate our natural world, call attention to the precariousness of our global ecosystem, and provide an opportunity to contemplate unthinkable experiences of environmental devastation.
As the natural world suffers increased destruction, our physical survival is threatened, annihilation anxiety rises, and we retreat into denial and inactivity. We must raise our emotional connection to the climate crisis to move from the position of passive bystanders stuck in environmental melancholia to engaged witnesses.
Inspired by and reacting to the idealized, seductive beauty of Hudson River School landscape painters, the photomontages are, at first glance, pictorial and idyllic. I hope viewers will be drawn in by the splendor of the landscape and the ease of relating to a familiar subject. A closer look challenges the sublime. I intend to puncture complacency around the “ongoingness” of our environment. I want observers to look beyond their expectations and ask, “Wait, what is happening here?”
I alter the colors and scale with editing tools and materially affix a photograph of a flourishing nature scene on rice paper onto a base print of a depleted environment. I link the two photographs through a color relationship or composition – for example, a mountain’s curve to a line in a stream – and secure them with photo corners. These postcards from the past reference souvenirs gathered in a scrapbook for remembrance: our natural world reduced to a nostalgic relic.
Our planet is in a precarious place, disintegrating as we lose glaciers, animals, trees, and fertile land. I attempt to stop things from vanishing, fix the harm, restore the losses, and put the land back together. I tear natural resources from one photograph and hastily connect them to another depleted environment with Japanese washi tape, creating a visceral experience of damage and repair. www.donnabassin.com
