Deering Estate Arts In Deep Exhibition Catalogue | Page 8

In closing…Earth Day Wrap Up of Eco-Artist in
Residence Program

6

With onsite studios located in the Deering Estate’s Artist Village
buildings - Carriage House and Pump House (c. 1918) – and
working from a multitude of disciplines and media, the
Eco-Artist Residence Program was created to inspire caring
and respect, stimulate dialogue, and encourage an interaction
between the social and natural environments in which we
live and thrive. In closing the grant supported activities
Based on participating artist’s responses to their two month,
grant-supported, studio residencies with mentor artist Lucinda
Linderman, the following anecdotal responses were noted
during a roundtable discussion amongst two of the participating
eco- and environmental- artists on Earth Day, April 22, 2014;
narrated by Felice Grodin.
Aida Tejada: Aida had a moment of intensity. She recalls
obsessively reclaiming soda cans -- around 800. She would
cut up the cans and unfurl them into tiles to be woven into
the collective consciousness in the form of a sculpture.
Many cans contained found debris, but one case in particular
moved her laterally from cause to effect. In this one she
discovered a gecko with eggs. Aida realized the contradiction.
The gecko had adapted, had utilized the properties of the
can to nest. It had already repurposed it and for all practical
purposes, rendered Aida’s sculpture adrift in the realm of
the humanly rhetorical. The gecko did not need it or her, and
from that point on Aida has had to reconsider her previous
anthropocentric stance.

Michael Gellatly: Michael had not a moment but a timeline
of sorts – like all cataclysms it contained a slow build-up and
then a fracture, a tear, one that puts things expeditiously in
motion. He had woven a narrative of two terrains. One, the
present extraction and burning of fossil fuels embedded in
the earth, was fused with the future shock of a frozen geotrauma of an oncoming ice age. It is the ultimate debt: the
borrowing of a carbon-based economy zeroing out to
extinction. As he delivered his finished piece – a series of
ink-stained ice sculptures, something happened on the way
to Deering within the machinery of the car. A metamorphosis
occurred. The formworks of balloons containing the dyed
protuberances were a melting black liquid, giving way like
oil. A collapse between past, present and future were one,
bound in the process of becoming. By the time the destabilized
pieces were exhibited they were unfixed, unnamable. For
the artist who chooses to grasp the unnamable, a mixed
ecology of thermodynamic states both human and not, this
is a beginning.