Media Reviews

Artist in Social Practice at the Environmental Resilience Institute and SoAAD, Indiana University

The Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University is pleased to present Hoosier Lifelines: Environmental and Social Change Along the Monon, 1847-2020, an artistic and historical exploration of Indiana’s changing environment along the remains of the historic Monon Railroad, from the Ohio River’s banks to Lake Michigan’s dunes.

IU Grunwald Gallery exhibition investigates Indiana’s natural history and environmental changes https://www.idsnews.com/article/2021/01/iu-grunwald-exhibition-indiana-environment-history

State of Nature: Picturing Indiana Biodiversity, was created and put together by the Director of Grunwald Gallery, Elizabeth “Betsy” Stirratt, along with the help of fellow professors, local artists, and the Indiana State Museum. In regards to the exhibit, Indiana University biologist and professor, Roger P. Hangarter stated, “As our ecosystems continue to degrade under our feet and around us, State of Nature will provide viewers with a visually compelling place to explore, examine question, connect to and contemplate what we stand to lose if we fail to change the way we treat the natural world.”

Interview: Indiana University Radio: Visual Artists Maria Whiteman and Rebecca Allan

By Aaron Cain Posted November 18, 2018

https://indianapublicmedia.org/profiles/visual-artists-maria-whiteman-rebecca-allan.php#:~:text=Maria%20Whiteman%20is%20an%20artist%20and%20photographer%20whose,observations%2C%20creating%20a%20document%20of%20how%20our%20

The ERI Explainer poses questions on environmental change and resilience to IU experts.

Western culture has long driven an intellectual wedge between humanity and the natural environment, a cognitive separation that has contributed to generations of environmental degradation and, ultimately, climate change. As the ERI Artistic Social Practice Fellow, Maria Whiteman uses art to tell stories about the interconnectedness of all living organisms and the oftentimes brutal disruption that human activity brings to natural relationships. In November, Whiteman’s work is on display at the IU Grunwald Gallery of Art and the Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science. Her piece Traces of Another Time in the Landscape examines the terrain of Western Canada through memory and touch, linking the geological history of the land with the present day. (Visit Whiteman’s website to see more of her exhibitions.)Whiteman recently spoke with the ERI Explainer about the role art can play in helping people connect to the environment.

Media Review: https://www.caetani.org/2015/05/11/fresh-air-may-2015-maria-whiteman-calgary/

Vice President of Research, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN (Bethan Roberts, Elisabeth Andrews)

Interconnectedness is at the heart of Maria Whiteman’s art. Engaging with animals, landscapes, and most recently fungi, she uses multiple media including photography and video to convey the deep and intrinsic ties between humans and other living things. As these interrelationships underlie environmental science, her goal at the Environmental Resilience Institute (ERI) is to create a visual entry point for people to approach the science through a visceral, emotional experience.

For example, her ongoing “Mind, Body and Matter” series features a photograph of a man with turkey tail mushrooms appearing to grow from his back. This depiction of human skin as a medium for fungal growth underscores the reality of the many microorganisms that live on and in human bodies. In “Wildlife and Oil: In the Air,” images of a great white egret gliding among billowing smokestacks highlight the toxic emissions to which the bird is exposed – and, by, extension, the pollutants entering the lungs of nearby residents. This movement from compassion for animals to recognition of human vulnerability is also central to her work with taxidermy. Through video recorded in storage rooms of natural history museums, she uses the act of stroking the preserved bodies of polar and grizzly bears to capture the instinct to associate ourselves with these threatened species.

Moving to Indiana to join the ERI awakened Whiteman’s interest in fungi, as mushrooms are such a predominant feature of the local natural landscape. She is currently working with IU biologist Roger Hangarter to grow and observe live fungi in addition to studying their role within ecosystems, environmental impact and their nutritional and medicinal uses. A forthcoming outdoor/indoor art installation series that Whiteman calls BioFungi Art is the next phase of her larger project at IU. It will consist of art that grows, decomposes and lives as part of a LiveArt installation. The upcoming art exhibits will invite residents to encounter these fungi through increasingly immersive media: first photography, then video, followed by virtual reality, and finally a living, growing installation allowing visitors to physically enter a fungal space. Eventually Whiteman would like to integrate BioFungi and LiveArt into Museums and Gallery spaces as contemporary eco-art. In the meantime, Whiteman is experimenting with fungal bricks as building material and mycelium filament as living mortal.

The turn toward the environmental impact in which fungi plays an essential role also represents an acknowledgement of the irreversible changes that humans have made to the ecosystem. By orientating toward a kingdom of organisms that thrive on decaying matter, Whiteman aims to position her work in the present moment of ecological collapse. Whereas her earlier work with taxidermy represented a mournful remembrance of animals facing extinction, her current projects look ahead to eagerly; curiously, and even playfully anticipate the altered ecosystems that humankind will inhabit.

Episode 155 – Maria Whiteman

By Joe Carson, Rice University Energy and Cultural Podcast with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer

My choice this year for my favorite podcast is perhaps a bit biased—I had the opportunity to take part in the Rice Seminar “After Biopolitics” with Maria Whiteman in 2015. Since then, I’ve followed her various artistic endeavors, which I encourage all of you to do as well. As Dominic and Cymene point out early in the recording, it is a challenge to discuss Whiteman’s visual and tactical artwork through the aural format of a podcast so supplement your listening experience with her website! While Whiteman discusses several of her installations, I was drawn to the common theme of touch. From her installations such as, “Anthropocene: Traces of Another Time in Landscape Photographs and Visual” (where Whiteman focused on a particular rock where bison had rubbed against it centuries ago as a point to emphasize changes in landscapes and environments) to her piece, “Mycelia” 2018-2022 (which shows fungi growing on the back of a human body), Whiteman’s visual representations of the Anthropocene push us to recognize how we come into close contact and proximity with things beyond ourselves—beyond the human, beyond our current moment in time and beyond our comfort. As Whiteman comments, she is drawn to reach out and grasp the things we might not; the things that would give us pause do not phase her. From these moments, she is able to beautifully capture these tactical encounters and recreate them through poignant and powerful images. Her narrations on this podcast provide an interesting and illuminating backstory to the well theorized and curated images on her website.

Antennae: Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. p.5 INTERVIEWEE: CARY WOLFE. INTERVIEWER: GIOVANNI ALOI Since the very beginning, rethinking human/animal relations has entailed reconsidering epistemology, ontology, and ethics. Along the way, on this ambitious journey, contemporary art has constantly provided invaluable opportunities to push disciplinary boundaries and test philosophical notions to breaking point. Twenty years later, so much has happened in animal-studies and much more has changed in contemporary art and philosophical. ISSUE 38 – WINTER 2016 ISSN 1756-9575

Houston Cinema Arts Festival, Houston, Texas Roadside Kestrel and Mountain Pine Beetle (with Deke Weaver)

UVP: Urban Video Project, I.M PEI Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. http://www.urbanvideoproject.com/artists/screening-panel-talk-between-species-2/ https://news.syr.edu/2016/02/uvp-features-between-species-21387/  Between Species Panel https://vimeo.com/166221073 Three Videos by  Maria Whiteman  http://www.urbanvideoproject.com/artists/between-species-maria-whiteman-touching-grizzly-far-from-your-home-loved-you-right-up-to-the-end/

MoW: Museum of Walking, Tempe, Arizona :http://us8.campaign-archive2.com/?u=9f56b50de528ef467ec5e40bd&id=72030afe63&e=424215382c

MoW: http://www.museumofwalking.org/exhibitions-2/#/temporal-changes-in-the-landscape/Alex Macpherson, “Memories of a Naturalist,” Verb News, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, June 2013.

Art and Design professor TUFFs it out UAlberta News, by Lana Cuthbertson, September 11, 2012.

Review of Hiking the Suburbs: https://www.ualberta.ca/art-design/about-art-and-design/news/2011/september/fineartsprofessorfeaturedinthejournalpublicartcultureideas.html

Bryan Alary, “Banff residency taps top scholars for acclaimed exhibit.” UAlberta News, August 15, 2012. Stephen Hunt, “dOCUMENTA at Banff Centre: a long conversation on art.” Calgary Herald, August 13, 2012. http://www.calgaryherald.com/entertainment/dOCUMENTA+Banff+Centre+long+conversation/7073180/story.html  “Artists strive to define our place in bigger picture.” Comox Valley Record, January 10, 2012. http://www.comoxvalleyrecord.com/entertainment/137048293.html

Amanda Boetzkes, "The Eternal Image of the Animal: Maria Whiteman, Taxonomia" Latitude 53 Gallery, Edmonton, AB, 2011. http://www.latitude53.org/archive/2011/Whiteman

Memories of a Naturalist  David LaRiviere Artistic Director http://www.pavedarts.ca How is it that the Memories of a Naturalist should relate to the work of artists Maria Whiteman and Clint Wilson? In order to address this question we will examine both of their respective art projects for a variety of concerns that pertain first to “memory,” then the soft science of the “naturalist” as related to the problematic[1]concept of “becoming.” In the first case, how do the general conditions of memory operate in relation to the pursuits of a naturalist? The initial assumption pertains to memory as a construction, one that serves as an organizing principle for much of the taxonomies of the Naturalist, call it the “knowledge-base.” The specimen only becomes “knowable” in the course of memory setting out an array of points that construct diorama, hence memory is the constituent element of its construction and, as we shall see, a point of departure for both of the artists concerned. The title for this exhibition, as with its curious appearance in A Thousand Plateaus-- found amidst a broader discussion of “becoming animal,” is here invoked not as a support, nor as a key or solution, but rather as a complex and ongoing problematic. If the Naturalist constructs her system from memories, moving from point to point, can the model be a sufficient account to determine, much less anticipate, the outcomes of a given ecosystem? Is it tenable for Scientific undertakings to encompass nature in this way? The artistic projects that comprise this exhibition are mounted precisely upon the terrain that escapes such determinations, variously exploring the pathos of capture and the limit-case of knowledge. Maria Whiteman photographs and videotapes various taxidermizedspecimens from within the vaults of Natural History Museums that she has gained access to. Her interest in this subject stems from an impetus to interrogate the scientific assumptions of Natural History with an intuitive and artistic procedure, one that implicates systems of knowledge that would subordinate affect to narrative. To be sure, a haunted sensibility cuts across both her photographic and video work, and it's not surprising given the base line fact that these are depictions of dead things positioned as living nature. Relative to her interest in diorama, the photographic series develops a theme of capture: vitality as it comes to be fixed in time. With each of the museo-logical specimens, a snarling coyote, a lynx, an owl, etc. Whiteman prints onto acetate transparency that is positioned on top of such materials as bubble wrap and corrugated cardboard. These everyday office supplies impact the work by effectively immersing her subject onto a tactile, grid-like substrate, an aggressive but well observed use of common materials. The animals photographed and presented in this way take on a heightened sense of capture, frozen not in amber but in packaging. Bestowed animistic postures of each subject in turn promotes a sense of pathos that carries throughout Whiteman's project, the snarling coyote is trapped in a moment of death after all.

 A similar sense of bio-political pathos is explored with Whiteman's video work, both pieces entitled I Saw You Standing There. The title refers to the artist's recording of an encounter between herself and a series of larger stuffed mammals, specimens that are likewisekeptin museum storage. Whiteman explained that a preliminary aspect of her process, before her performance, involves obtaining permissions, a matter that may be supported or justified by related academic and artistic activities, and one that entails navigating institutional authority. Suffice it to say that the project's critical bearing must be carefully disclosed. Even at that, the permission that is granted only goes part of the way. Whiteman obtained general access to museum storage in order to photograph various specimens, but she only touchedthem when no one was looking. The camera tracks over the the body and face of the static animal in a slow, fluid motion, always at close range and following the artist's hand (surreptitiously) raking with and against the nap of the animal's fur. Around the edges of this interaction we catch snippets of the metal cage upon which a deer, for example, is hanging by an s-hook from its rump. The importance of such overtly violent edge-work lies in the way that the storage context overcomes, even implicates commodity fetishism, as with the kind of eroticism associated with stroking a fur coat. Especially where, for example, the grizzly's face is concerned, the encounter that Whiteman stages implies a haptic communication, imbued as her action is with a close range, textural exploration. Empathy turns to pathos at the very moment that the intimate touch meets with an inert mass, an animal-become-prop for the memory of a naturalist. Whereas Maria Whiteman contemplates the capture and pathos embodied by the natural history specimen, the counter-attack staged in Clint Wilson's project targets the what Deleuze and Guatarri describe as a “Royal Science,”[2]the science of establishment and control. A case in point is Wilson's Untitled (Series), a grouping of nine colour photographs that feature labelled specimens, each named according to genus or species. The dictates of a taxonomy, a science of classification that assigns points and fixes the specimen, is also operative in a process that reduces a given animal to little more than a mnemonic device. As with Whiteman's photographic series, Wilson deploys a shallow depth of field that mostly obscures its subject, drawing tiny areas into focus with a technique that resembles the tilt-shift lens effect. What is blurred in these photographs is precisely what ordinarily functions as an explicit relation,  between the specimen and its corresponding name, the coordinates that locate this once-animal as genus and species. Wilson builds a tension between the label and the specimen, playing with focus so as to posit a purposeful ambiguity, a kind of mystery seeded inside of the declaration. Untitled (Series) was mounted in solid black frames of identical dimensions, foregrounding modular and interchangeable properties in the work. In fact with prior installations Wilson has configured the series in a grid, and in some situations edited out images for space. Between the hard, regular geometry of the thick black frames and the blurry displacement of the subject photographed, another content emerges, that of an overwrought scientific determination, one that fails to grasp the complexity of the subject as a multiplicity, the mysterious subject that embodies an entire constellation of affects that enter into composition with an open, chaotic system. In Wilson's series, what escapes the taxonomic memory of the expert Naturalist is precisely this movement of becoming.

Up until now we have considered only photographs and videos of dead specimens, and as such both artists have imbued their respective frozen bestiaries with unexpected dimensions. In different ways, the diorama and other devices of museological “authority” are herein implicated as being little more than determinations that move from point to point, reducing a given animal to an established memory, a fully formed, even clichénarrative representation. With his video installation Carousel,Wilson turns his attention to the living specimen, timber wolves to be exact, and to their corresponding, quasi-scientific institutional frame: the zoo. The installation is named Carouselon account of its odd configuration, involving two video projectors mounted on posts in the centre of the gallery space, each post outfitted with a motor that rotates the projectors and projected video clockwise and counter-clockwise. The tracking movement of the video projection has an obvious allusion to a fairground carousel. However, a more ominous association overshadows the relatively cheerful title of this work, as the arrangement likewise alludes to the Panopticon-- the infamous prison design invented by 18thcentury British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. As with the Panopticon, Wilson places the “sentry” post at the centre. Consequently, everyone entering into the installation is compelled to adopt the warden's 360 degree vantage point in relation to the caged wolves. The projections themselves allude to cells, and their continuous back and forth tracking movements, which mechanically pan through a prison-in-the-round, double back at a certain point and intersect at times. Hence the movement of the video “cells” allude to the compulsive pacing of the wolves. With this work Wilson contests the fundamental assumption that in captivity we find timber wolves living, as it were, in a cross section of their “natural” environment. The artist notes the pacing of the timber wolves fits a disturbing profile of animal mental illness sometimes referred to as stereotypy[3]. Having said this, what is at stake in Carouselgoes way beyond a statement about animal rights. The wolves and their artificial habitat, like the museum diorama, are exposed as a Panopticism; a centralized form of surveillance and control, ultimately an expression of disciplinary society that privileges a “Royal Science,” and produces only the story of what is already established. In this way Carouselmakes legible a counterproductive scientific expression of power, one that brutally subordinates that which is a chaotic and unpredictable to a mere representationIn part two of the three-part BBC series All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace,documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis traces a brief history of the Naturalist and the popular notion of the “Ecosystem.” Within this recounting there are episodes of falsifying data and other byproducts of specious thinking, at one extreme leading to The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts[4]and subsequently the apartheid system in South Africa. Perhaps more interesting than all of the skeletons in the closet, Curtis also recounts the challenges that are mounted from within Ecological science, the projects that overturn controlling scientific orthodoxy. One such instance is the story of George Van Dyne, the first director of the “Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory.”  With only the best of intentions Van Dyne set out to build a comprehensive, cybernetic model of a complete ecosystem, painstakingly slitting open the bellies of insects, analyzing deer feces, etc. Upon entering an unprecedented volume of data Van Dyne discovered the opposite of what he was looking for, namely that the consideration of such comprehensive detail did not lead to a more comprehensive model but rather an increasingly chaotic one. While it is true that the system is rife with feedback, it is notclosed, and the lines of escape will always overwhelm the model, increasingly so when it is rigorous. This is the point of departure for the art work in question, whether through pathos and touch, or by counter-attack, Maria Whiteman and Clint Wilson engage is an artistic expression that is in excess of the diorama, of the zoo, and that overspills the semiotic bounds of the memories of the naturalist.

[1]   “Problematic” understood as the activityof a problem, or a problem that is in motion as opposed to a problem that is situated. [2]   In A Thousand Plateausthe concept of a “Royal Science” is opposed to “Nomad Science.” Whereas the former procedure is based on defending what is “established,” and is legislative in that it's equations are invoked or privileged by the State apparatus, Nomad Science is predicated on “following” an uncharted course, inseparable from intuition, experimentation, and continuous variation. [3]   See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypy_(non-human) [4]   Arthur Tansley, who coined the term “ecosystem,” levelled this accusation of “abuse” at Field Marshal Smuts, who deployed a perverse version of ecological science to justify the institution of Apartheid in South Africa.