group show 68
Four Degrees
About the Artists

Shane Anderson
Bio: Shane Anderson is an artist and educator based in Arroyo Grande, California. His work over the past few years has focused on issues related to landscape use and how it is perceived and utilized. He has been investigating the ways in which we invest in and occupy space, trying to gain a deeper understanding of how landscape can function as an index of the relationships between social groups and their environments.

Statement: The work deals with ideas about today’s socio-systemic world in which land values shape geography and eventually the lives of people. Landscape representations are attitudes of awareness, and how we interpret them confronts us with shared visions of ourselves and of the world.  The images reflect the incongruous relationship today between people and their environment.  They capture the effects of society on the landscape, and ways in which landscape has influenced the advance of civilization.

Zach Bradford
Bio: Zach is an artist based in the beautiful state of Utah. His work is heavily focused on the highlighting the issues effecting our environment, and public lands. 

Statement: This series of photographs highlights a water system that has seen some serious issues in the past 20 years. Schofield reservoir and its main tail water Lower fish creek located in Central Utah. Schofield and Lower fish creek were once considered blue ribbon fisheries that were held in high esteem by local anglers, but due to mis management and drought the fisheries have been adversely effected and it has completely degraded a resource that is irreplaceable. 

Matteo Capone
Bio: Matteo Capone born in Rome in 1997. In 2017 he started a degree in Photography at the 'Istituto Europeo di Design (IED)' in Rome, where he graduated with honors in september 2020. ​He is a contemporary photographer interested in the research and the visual narration of current issues as environment protection and pollution. Matteo uses landscape, documentary and abstract photography as personal artistic expression and visual language. 

Statement: “SIN” is a visual research that focuses on pollution and environmental protection. In Italy there are 38 highly polluted areas called “Sites of National Interest (SIN)". The project now concerns three SINs of central Italy: Bussi sul Tirino-Piano d’Orta (Abruzzo); Orbetello (Tuscany); Terni-Papigno (Umbria). All have former factories of the Montecatini company, chemical poles, asbestos in a pulverized and huge waste dumps that arise in the valleys or are stationed under the citizen's houses.

Virginia Carr
Bio: Using traditional photographic processes, Virginia Carr’s work explores themes of family, memory, place and home. Her work has been exhibited in various galleries across the southeast and she holds a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design.  She currently lives in Austin, TX with her husband and their three dogs.

Statement: I alter the colors in the landscapes using the seven hues found in the Chakra System. The chakra colors typically indicate the current emotional, spiritual and physical state of the human being. The altered colors in the landscapes become a metaphor for the extreme emotional anxiety I feel when faced with the stark realities of climate change. 

Anahit Cass
Bio: Kristin Anahit Cass’s work explores intensely personal spaces where our lives intersect those of others, considering underlying questions of social justice and human rights.  A queer artist of mixed ethnicity, her work reflects her passion for amplifying diverse voices telling stories that inspire change. Cass is especially interested in the role women play in the survival and evolution of cultures and communities.  Through her work she seeks to dream, to resist, to imagine the future.

Statement: Using natural forms as symbols, my work reflects on the changes in our world caused by anthropogenic climate effects. The works from this project consider our place within the natural world, as we are part of the ecosystems we inhabit.  These works explore the intersection of the natural world and the world within, and the way that the changes and threats to the natural world are often mirrored by the turmoil within.

Aakriti Chandervanshi
Bio: Aakriti Chandervanshi is a visual artist whose work spans unique geographies and is embedded in the contexts of her everyday in the landscapes of South Asia. As an architectural graduate, the roots of her practice emerge from her keen interest in the historicities of the built environment and relevant debates around the discourse on their conservation. She is devoted to her work and pets, perhaps not as equally as she would like.

Statement: After Eden talks about the lives of the indigenous communities in Khokana and Bungamati being affected on the grounds of beliefs, identity and economy due to the ongoing state initiated project of 78 kms long stretch of “fast-track” road under construction leading to migration, pollution and loss of ecology. The tainted terrains are a constant reminder of how the notion of progress trumps people, continually erasing and overwriting the land and memory.

Michael Dillow
Bio: Michael Dillow is a lens-based artist whose work explores the relationship between psychological state of mind, memory, and geographical location using book formats and other non-traditional means of installation. Currently, he maintains an active studio practice in South Florida where he works as a photography instructor.

Statement: These photographs derive from my ongoing research into South Florida’s complex identity. The documentary-style work utilizes an on-camera flash to create images that articulate a psychological space while evoking narrative associations; like that of crime scene photography, where something must have happened or will. In addition, the work is informed by my own lived experience relocating to its environment seeking recovery from substance abuse.

Benjamin Dimmitt
Bio: Benjamin Dimmitt photographs wetlands and forests using film and a medium format camera. He uses his camera to investigate interdependence, competition, survival and mortality in the natural environment. Benjamin was born and raised in Florida. He graduated from Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, FL and also studied at the International Center of Photography in NYC, NY and Santa Fe Photographic Workshop. He taught at I.C.P. from 2001-2013. He now lives in Asheville, NC.

Statement: This work documents the impact of climate change and rising sea levels along Florida’s Gulf Coast. What had been verdant, semi-tropical forest is now mostly an open plain of grasses relieved by palms and dying hardwood trees. Sabal palms are the most salt tolerant trees in this ecosystem and are the last to expire. As the saltwater moves inland, poisoning the once rich earth as it goes, this landscape will succumb to the sea.

Leah Dyjak
Bio: Leah Dyjak (1981, Springfield MA) received their BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2006 and their MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. Dyjak’s work has been exhibited across the country at places such as the Houston Center of Photography, Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio, and The Front Gallery in New Orleans. Currently, they hold the position as Assistant Professor of Visual Art at Wheaton College MA, and live in Providence Rhode Island. Their work is represented by the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown Massachusetts.

Statement: A Force Majeure, or superior force, is a common clause for corporations to add to a contract. It protects parties from liability in the event of an act of God or bad global circumstances. These “events” include war, strike, riot, crime, hurricane, flood, earthquake, volcanic eruption, a global pandemic- things catastrophic, unforeseeable. The fragments in these photographic installations make use of a collapsed parking lot along the shoreline of coastal Massachusetts. The form of the installation attempts to convey what the camera lens and prints alone cannot. The point of focus: the mutability of boundary, frame, instability of surface, and the erasure of boundary. The work represents the material failure of both the medium of photography and our infrastructure, specifically relating to water and seismic activity. As we have attempted to bend the natural world to our capitalistic needs, the effects of this hubris are made visible in erratic weather patterns and the mangled landscape of the everyday.

Odette England
Bio: Odette England uses photography to explore land, gender, and ritual. She is an Artist-in-Residence at Amherst College and a resident artist of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program in New York. Her work has been shown in more than 100 solo, two-person, and group exhibitions worldwide. For 2021, England is a Light Work Artist in Residence; a recipient of the Silver Eye Center for Photography Fellowship and a nominee for the Prix Pictet.

Statement: These images are from England’s series ‘Degrees’, made during the 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season. England spent six weeks travelling in and out of the fire zone, making photographs and collecting ash, which she rubbed into the surfaces of her large-scale gelatin silver prints.

Tracy Fish and Tim Hodge
Bio: Tracy Fish and Tim Hodge are collaborative artists who first met at Coastal Carolina University, where they received a BA in Art Studio (2012). Their first collaborative book, Chasing the Paper Canoe was published in 2013 by Athenaeum Press. Both artists explore narratives of place, memory, and identity through photography, filmmaking, and experimental videography. Fish and Hodge have won various awards and exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Statement: This or Something In Between is a collaborative exploration by Tracy Fish and Tim Hodge that bears witness to the ramifications of anthropogenic climate change that continues to threaten the existence of various regions we call home. Currently, as we live on opposite coasts, our project takes on a call-and-response style of conversation by creating a third character: the landscape through polyptychs, which examine the inherent conflict between built and natural environments.

Lindsay Godin
Bio: Lindsay Godin is an American fine art documentary photographer and a recent 2018 University of Iowa MFA graduate of Studio Arts in Photography. Her work sheds awareness on contemporary American cultural norms and political values and how they affect American society on the macro scale. Lindsay is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography and Design at Valdosta State University.

Statement: I have been capturing images of human-caused wildfires and its resulting physical destruction upon the western landscape. I photograph sites that deliberately portray tight vantage points and unrevealing horizons to symbolize a pessimistic and unforeseeable future pertaining to climate change. My images attempt to capture physical destruction through a heavy dose of black and color demonstrating a metaphorical parallel of the environmental destruction to the collective psychological trauma humans endure, along with a fatalistic inescapability from the future that lies ahead.

Riley Goodman
Bio: Riley Goodman inquires folklore, American history, and humankind's relationship with the environments they inhabit in an effort to understand what endures, and how this endurance exists in relation to his own presence in the canon. By building narratives that create an ever-occurring amalgamation of time, Goodman encourages the viewer to question the tenants of authenticity, leaving 'historical truth' in an undisclosed middle ground. Goodman’s work has appeared in Time, Vice, and Oxford American, among other outlets.

Statement: My series From Yonder Wooded Hill remarks partially on the cyclical nature of the flooding of the Patapsco River Valley where I was raised, an increasingly commonplace occurrence due to climate change and a disregard to sustainable construction practices. The same river that built the valley’s industry is destroying it, leaving only silent reminders and warnings- cloth stuck in trees after receding floodwaters, historic buildings moved like children’s playthings, streets buried beneath hillside bracing.

Allison Grant
Bio: Allison Grant is an artist, writer, curator, and Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Alabama. Her artworks have been exhibited at venues including the High Museum of Art, DePaul Art Museum, Azimuth Projects, and Catherine Edelman Gallery. Works by Grant are held in collections at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), DePaul Art Museum (Chicago), Columbia College Chicago, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Research Foundation art collection, and the King County Portable Works Collection (Seattle).

Statement: These photographs are from my ongoing project “Within the Bittersweet.” The series is a dark pastoral narrative about raising my children amid concerns about the impacts of climate crisis and environmental contamination. In photographs taken in and around my home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, dense vegetation and natural beauty intersect with industrial and fossil fuel facilities that dot our region. These industries spread particulates and toxins across the terrain and into our bodies and the atmosphere. My artwork entwines the dark realities of the landscape we live in with representations of my deep love for my children and the physical world around us—a living tapestry of incredible complexity that my daughters are only just coming to know. The climate crisis will undoubtedly reshape the world they inherit, and through photographs I negotiate the beauty and heartbreak of raising them on a wonderous planet in the midst of change.

Pato Hebert
Bio: Pato Hebert is an artist, teacher and organizer. His work explores the aesthetics, ethics and poetics of interconnectedness. His creative projects have been presented at Beton7 in Athens, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Quito, the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, the Songzhuang International Photo Biennale, and IHLIA LGBT Heritage in Amsterdam. He serves as Chair of the Department of Art & Public Policy at NYU. He has also worked in HIV prevention with queer communities of color since 1994.

Statement: In, If Not Always Of features an ambiguous presence that I call “The Oscillator” appearing in various landscapes. The Oscillator seems to reflect its context, yet is not so easily of its environment. It queries our relationship to place and space, and our false oppositions between nature and culture. These distinctions are a dangerous part of our ecological challenge as so many life forms are being dramatically impacted by climate change. Humans cannot simply see ourselves as exceptional and apart, nor view land as an object or thing. Such thinking leads to dangerous oppositions of either exploitation or preservation, rather than more supple understandings of living in rich and complex symbiosis.

Yadira Hernández-Picó
Bio: Yadira Hernández-Picó is a Puerto Rican photojournalist, educator, and visual storyteller. Her chronicle of Hurricane Maria’s aftermath in Puerto Rico has been recognized with the NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant (2020) and recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, in partnership with the Fundación Puertorriqueña de las Humanidades (2018). Awarded by the 16th Julia Margaret Cameron Award-Women Seen by Women and featured by Lens Magazine (2021). Member of Women Photograph.

Statement: “Volver a casa” is an intimate chronicle of the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The series documents the despair and resilience of the people impacted and the disproportioned impact of environmental change on remote, rural underrepresented communities in my hometown of Maricao, western Puerto Rico, from the perspective of an insider, since I also experienced the shock of finding my mother’s home—the house where I grew up—destroyed.

Jim Hill
Bio: Jim Hill is a Chicago based photographer who is focused on photographing the world at night. A San Francisco Bay Area native, Jim is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and has lived in the Chicago Area for over 30 years. After an international career as a groundwater geologist, Jim is now focusing his time and energy on photography.

Statement: This photo was shot in 1987 during my career working on the cleanup of hazardous waste sites.

Pengkuei Ben Huang
Bio: Ben Huang is a Taiwanese/Canadian photographer based in Toronto, Canada. He graduated in Academy of Art University in San Francisco, USA in 2004 and was chosen as one of the finalists for The Scotiabank Prize in 2007 at Magnum Workshop in Toronto under the guidance of the renowned photographer Larry Towell. He has been interested in utilizing photography as a medium to form a narrative that explores the relationship between humans and their environments.

Statement: The Japanese Government has been building 400 kms of seawalls in the Northeastern region, after the 2011 tsunami. Questions however, have been raised whether it will fend off future disasters effectively.

Stella Kalinina
Bio: Stella Kalinina is a Russian-Ukrainian American photographer based in Los Angeles working on contemplative stories about human connections, personal and communal histories, and the places we inhabit. She brings empathy, curiosity, and a collaborative approach to portrait-based stories that are firmly rooted in a sense of place.

Statement: These photographs were made throughout Southern California and represent my emotions behind my continuously evolving understanding of this region. The evidence of human actions in the landscape shows not only scars, losses, and vulnerabilities, but also opportunities to correct course.

Daniel Kariko
Bio: Daniel Kariko is a North Carolina based artist, and an Associate Professor of Fine Art Photography in School of Arts and Design at East Carolina University, in Greenville, North Carolina. Kariko’s images investigate environmental and political aspects of landscape, use of land and cultural interpretation of inhabited space. Since 1999 Kariko documented the endangered wetlands and dramatic changes in the landscape in Barataria- Terrebonne region of South Louisiana.

Statement: Louisiana is experiencing the highest rate of coastal erosion in America, losing about one hundred yards of land every thirty minutes- land loss the size of a football field every half-hour. Many of Louisiana’s communities, including Indigenous Americans, Cajuns, and Vietnamese Americans are affected through loss of natural resources, economic impact, and direct loss of property. Their plight is less visible than that of New Orleans, and other urban areas.

Meghan Kirkwood
Bio: Meghan L. E. Kirkwood is a photographer who researches the ways landscape imagery can inform and advance public conversations around land use, infrastructure, and values towards the natural environment.

Statement: An increasing number of unprofitable ‘orphan wells’ are being abandoned by their owners and left for states and local communities to manage, often leaking oil and brine and emitting methane gas. This collection of images explores issues concerning orphan wells around Oil City, a resource-rich region in northwestern Louisiana. The series looks at the ways these orphan wells interface against the verdant, rural landscape of small communities and natural areas in and around Oil City.

Nathan Kosta
Bio: Nathan Kosta is a visual artist, educator, and photographic technology researcher living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work explores issues relating to surveillance capitalism, photographic image recognition, machine learning, and land use.

Statement: Through this series of photographs, I examine my position as a human living during the Anthropocene. Contrasting the overwhelming momentum of neoliberalism and consumerism with the reality of increasingly rapid environmental degradation, I question my own complicity and apathy, as well as that of my peers. Against a backdrop of enveloping technological saturation, I use photography to cope with the unrelenting narrative of inevitable catastrophic destruction, while simultaneously encouraging the collective imagination of a hopeful future.

Jason Langer
Bio: Jason Langer is an American Photographer best known for his psychological and noirish visions of contemporary urban life. Secret City, his first monograph published by Nazraeli Press, depicts night and dusk scenes of various cities with “carefully crafted compositions reminiscent of the symbolist photographers, and swathes of meticulously printed deep black tones characteristic of the gelatin silver process…as much Hopper and Raymond Chandler as Steichen” (Bomb Magazine).

Statement: This photograph is part of a series on the vestiges of the Oregon forest fires, 2020. The Blue River fire was one of the most devastating in Oregon’s history. This photograph depicts some of the remains of an RV camper, as part of one of the largest RV camping sites in Oregon where scores of people were displaced.

Holly Lynton
Bio: Holly Lynton is a photographer based in Western Massachusetts. Lynton received a BA in Psychology in 1994 from Yale University and an MFA in Photography from Bard College in 2000. Lynton's photographs have been exhibited internationally and will be on view during the 2021 exhibition On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at the Yale University Art Gallery. Lynton has received numerous awards and grants including The Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, and The Syngenta Photography Award. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Miami Herald, The New York Times, Harvard Design Magazine, and The Boston Globe.

Statement: The photography series "Bare Handed" presents a portrait of Americans facing their relationship to nature as technology alters their environment. Instead of portraying the effects of big agriculture on their livelihood and natural resources, these photographs depict people who honor the land through their dedicated stewardship. This decade-long series celebrates an almost spiritual practice that goes far beyond the yields of a harvest, and highlights traditions edging toward disappearance.

Cree Moore
Bio: Cree is a visual artist that works primarily in medium format and 35 mm film photography. Her practice is based in exploring the landscape and interconnectivity of environment and humanity’s multidimensional depths. She is particularly inspired by the uniquely human struggle to be understood. Cree is entirely self taught and uses her individual lens to express what the future of creation can, and perhaps should, look like. She currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.

Statement: Intrenchment Creek Park resides in approximately 500 acres of forest, and this forest is on the brink of destruction and development. This series intends to capture the reflections of humanness in the natural world by making visible the consciousness of nature. The sheer fabric encasing the creature highlights the thin separation between our human body and the land where we reside. The only thing that separates us from our surroundings is our perspective.

Samantha Otto
Bio:

Statement:

Daniela Pafundi
Bio: Daniela is a photographer based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She participated in individual exhibitions: "Despierta" (2013), "El desierto inquieto" with the photographer Daniela Trabuchi (2013), "La forma de las cosas que vendrán" (2014), “Armonía y Rebelión” at Photogenic Festival (2017) and collective exhibitions at the University of Palermo, Centro Cultural Matienzo and Stripart among others. She has chosen photography as her main means of expression for more than 10 years and gives workshops since 2009.

Statement: The serie investigates the tensions that arise from the relationship we have with the Earth. I consider photography as a ritual act, as a ceremony that is built over and over again by putting in action the symbolic. For this I compile and re-enact rituals from various communities, investigating my own connection with the Earth. I stage desire becoming act. I use the photographic medium to ritualize.

Jason Pevey
Bio: Jason Pevey is a contemporary landscape photographer living and working on the unceded ancestral Lands of the Duwamish and Coastal Salish peoples.

Statement: These images are from a larger body of work called "Roots & Branches", made during the summer of 2020 as a coping mechanism for uncertainty, loss, and despair.

Curro Rodriguez
Bio: Master of Contemporary Photography, Eftí, Madrid. He resides in Iceland. His work is situated between photography, video, and performance in natural spaces. He has participated in international video art exhibitions: IVAHM, Madrid, WOW Venice. Taking part in exhibitions as Begira Photo, Pa-ta-ta Photography, or Ser-Aqui, in Cádiz. And awards and distinctions in Upcycling or Photoalicante prize. His work was published being part of books, “On Nature”, by NONFICTION Paris, Handbali Magazine, or EXC! Magazine.

Statement: Debla talks about human behavior, about the not relationship between man and nature. Debla walks among stages recreated by people and forget after has been used. Freud talked about "unheimlich", I am trying to put images of that strangely familiar concept walking around cities and refunding abandon spaces as nature did it before us. With this project I am working with borders and limits between us and other world, the ancient world, the real earth.

Raoofeh Rostami
Bio: Raoofeh Rostami is a photographer. (born1985) She studied photography at Art University of Tehran. During her study she began working professionally for the Iranian press . Covering range of social issues. She was fascinated by the relationship or distance between people and their environments. After years she found new fields of interest which led to her latest body of works. She concentrated on location. This vision shaped the first art installation which was based on photos.

Statement: Our lives are intertwined with forests and thousands of plant and animal species are in danger of extinction. If we act now, we can yet put it right.

Katie Shapiro
Bio: Born in 1983, Katie Shapiro received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2015 and a BFA in Photography from CalArts in 2007. Her practice is centered on the ineffable, and visualizing things that cannot be seen. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, The Armory Center, Pasadena, Christopher Grimes, Santa Monica, Joan, Los Angeles and Aperture Gallery, New York. Her work has received coverage in Artforum, the Los Angeles Times, and New York Magazine and is housed in private collections as well as in the permanent collection at the Huntington Library. She’s been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre and at Bullseye Glass in Pasadena. Shapiro lives and works in Los Angeles.

Statement: I documented architecture that protects other architecture in Malibu Sandbags. The series was shot on Broad Beach, an exclusive stretch of oceanfront in Malibu where homeowners erected sandbags in front of their properties to block the rising sea. Over two years I photographed the erosion and witnessed the beach get smaller and the barricades larger. Now there’s hardly any beach and imported boulders conceal the sandbags.

Kelsey Sucena
Bio: Kelsey Sucena (they/them) is a trans*/nonbinary photographer, writer, and park ranger. Their work rests at the intersection of photography and text. It is centered broadly upon the United States as a site for anti-capitalist, queer, and critical reflection. Kelsey is a recent MFA graduate from Image Text Ithaca (2020), Managing Editor of The Photocaptionist, and a freelance writer with contributions to Float Photo Magazine, Rocket Science, and 10x10 Photobooks.

Statement: From an ongoing project called “Paralytic States” this selection of images exemplify the underlying environmental themes of the project overall. First, a memorial in El Paso to the victims of a self-described eco-fascist. Second, the aftermath of brush fires which threatened the Ronald Regan Presidential library. Third, a delicate oasis in Joshua Tree undermined by changing weather. Fourth, the Salton Sea, shrunken and choked off by polluting runoff. Fifth, a Valero oil Refinery in Memphis.

Ilir Tsouko
Bio: Ilir is a documentary photographer and visual storyteller, based in Berlin and Tirana. He is working on long-term projects revolving around perception and creation of identity with its ever-changing shapes. Migration, social issues and political events that can be reflected directly into the society, are subjects that he mostly follows.

Statement: As a result of the war in Eastern Ukraine, over a million displaced people are looking for a new home. Some are drawn to a place that has so far stood for destruction and annihilation, danger and desolation. About a new beginning around Chernobyl.

Leticia Valverdes
Bio: Leticia Valverdes is an UK based Brazilian photographer with many years of experience in documentary and socially engaged projects.She has worked in the Amazon, travelling the region extensively, both for photo stills and TV documentaries.She last visited the Amazon in March 2020 to interview a world renown climatologist and environmentalist,Carlos Nobre,for Netflix.She studied Photography in London and her work have featured in many group and solo shows in the UK and abroad and published internationally.

Statement: A series of images, created by my children and I, of Amazonian indigenous peoples and their forest home. Made with fire, gold, blood, earth and leaves. While transforming these images with my children, and through their eyes, I could personally touch on the grief and sensation of impotence I feel for the fact that whole ethnic groups and their habitats can cease to exist. Yet I wanted to be reminded of the beauty of the moments I shared with such peoples and the forest. I wanted to find some hope in the process. We hope our series, created during the pandemic lockdown by intervening on my archive of Amazonian pictures, can inspire other young people to learn, to ask questions and to love the habitat and the people that humanity cannot afford to lose.

Tineke van der Pouw Kraan
Bio: Tineke van der Pouw Kraan is a medical biologist and photographer based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. After a career as a medical scientist, she has studied photography (Photo Academy, Amsterdam). Through her images she hopes to restore the lost connection of humans with nature. She feels that a greater awareness of the way nature interacts with us and the way we affect eco systems, will motivate us to take better care of our natural environment.

Statement: The Netherlands is proud of its steel industry. We all benefit from its products, but not without a cost. There is a huge emission of carbon dioxide and soot, because it uses coal as an energy source. Strangely enough the beach visitors do not seem to be bothered too much by these factories.

Arthur Van Erps
Bio: Arthur uses photography as a medium that enables him to translate indistinct and vague constructions of materialized feelings into something universal, something readable and something visual. Arthur imagery is as walking into an empty theater, stories took place but all that’s left is leftover props and an empty stage.

Statement: Have you ever wondered what lays near your feet? The surface we walk upon is vital to human civilization. We need it. It holds all our supplies, a treasure chest spread out on earth’s surface. It has fed all organisms back to the beginning of time. As earth is everywhere it has different meanings to different people. A scientist might see it as life’s origin. A farmer might see it as a way of means. An artist might see its depth, colour, and composition. Whatever you see the collective gaze has turned somber. The canvas of life has stories to tell.

Lori Waselchuk
Bio: Lori Waselchuk is a Philadelphia-based documentary photographer, collaborator, project coordinator, curator, and activist. Her work is rooted in community – the possibilities, the tensions and challenges of working together for a common idea or good.

Statement: These images are from the project, “In and Out of New Orleans (High Ground)”, 2005 – 2010, which reflects on the trauma, the police violence, the racism, the evacuation and great migration of people set in motion by Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is an island – its bridges stand irresolutely as either links or barriers; high ground in a flood or a commute home to the suburbs. Their functionality depends on our intentions, politics, fears and hopes.

Forest Woodward
Bio: Forest Woodward is an internationally published and awarded photographer and filmmaker based out of Asheville, North Carolina. With an eye towards issues of social and environmental justice, Forest's recent projects have led him from the the fields of the South Central Florida following stories of migrant farm workers, to the side canyons of Lake Powell investigating the water wars of the American West, and most recently to the front lines of climate change in the deep South Pacific. Throughout his work Forest seeks to document his subjects in a way that transcends politics and prejudice and offers the viewer an opportunity to engage in relevant contemporary issues through an observational humanistic lens.

Statement: Two sets of images - one from Tuvalu, low lying South Pacific Island slated to be first nation to lose sovereignty due to climate change. Second set of images from my personal experience of aridifcation here in my back yard on the Colorado Plateau where we are currently in the midst of a megadrought shift towards long term aridification.