Image credit: Geoff Wichert
Egyptians, Romans, and Europeans all painted landscapes in order to simulate perfect nature in their homes throughout the year, or even for eternity. During the reign of Britain’s Queen Victoria, the invention of the greenhouse made it possible to introduce the public to galleries filled with exotic, actually living plants, beginning with giant lilies that were brought around the world to reproduce scenes of actual, not just imaginary, gardens.
Acting on their example, today’s controlled indoor climates make artificial environments part of homes, offices and public spaces. Artists have created some more original adventures in architectural decor by mounting plants on the interior and exterior walls of large, often public spaces, such as the Charles-de-Gaulle airport. None of these is quite so compelling as the collaboration at UMOCA between US Geological Survey scientist Dr. Sasha Reed, who studies biocrusts and has created an audio-visual record of her encounters, and Jorge Rojas, an artist whose work in unconventional multi-media has distinguished a prolific career.
Almost half a century ago, signs in places like Arches, then a national monument, began alerting hikers to the existence of the drylands biocrusts, while asking them not to step on this easily overlooked ground cover. Today, biocrusts are often referred to as the Earth’s skin, and while that’s not quite correct, it is a very satisfying metaphor. Composed of various combinations of bacteria, cyanobacteria, fungi, lichens, and mosses, these thin colonies of living organisms that form on desert sands, rocks and other arid surfaces capture water that might otherwise be lost to evaporation, then interact strongly with the soil beneath them, holding the ground together and reducing weathering and erosion. Unlike our skin, they are capable of photosynthesizing their own food and are also more alive than an animal’s hide, which usually includes non-living layers like scales, feathers, fur and dead cells.
Image credit: Geoff Wichert
Drylands currently account for approximately 40 percent of the Earth’s land surface. With drought and warming on the uptake, this number is likely to increase. An estimated quarter of that nearly half the dry land supports this low, typically brown, bumpy-looking growth. Most of its likely constituents can dry out without harm, but when they do they may look dead, or like they were never alive in the first place. It’s largely for this reason that desert explorers were slow to become aware that the crunching underfoot wasn’t just sand, but a rugged, yet vulnerable living thing. Given the dramatic increase in outdoor adventurers, national park vacationers, and so forth, it’s important that we become more aware of this underfoot ecosystem. Besides, just as human skin is the largest organ in the body, so a life form that ranges over so much marginal land must be one of the most populous and important organisms on Earth.
The Canyonlands Research Center (CRC) set up their Artist in Residence (AiR) program to spread awareness of ecology and land use solutions through collaborations between scientists and artists. In this inaugural effort, the Biocrust Project, Dr. Sasha Reed’s recorded researches are heard by visitors to the terrarium in UMOCA’s Exit Gallery, while Rojas has created what could well be described as a “fractal” model of the crust in its environment. In a fractal, each segment of a form has the same shape as the whole. In this case, that means that what could be, from a short distance, an architect’s or railroad enthusiast’s scale model of the desert is discovered, on closer approach, to be the actual, full-size drylands crust. Other parallels might be to a Bonsai tree or a Zen Garden, two Japanese art forms using living materials that represent across scale. The thought comes to mind that such a model should be available to study at every botanical opportunity, so we can all come to know and recognize this oldest and yet only recently recognized companion on the planet we must all learn to share.
Image credit: Geoff Wichert
Jorge Rojas & Dr. Sasha Reed: The Biocrust Project, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through June 1
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
