“We are all burnt by ultraviolet rays. We all contain water in about the same ratio as Earth does, and salt water in the same ratio that the oceans do. We are poems about the hyperobject Earth.” -Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects

We are on borrowed time. The earth that sustains us suffers at our hands and yet we do little to change the course of the destruction we know lies ahead. Our leaders talk but do not act. And we continue living lives of constant consumption, all the while with a voice somewhere inside us imploring us to change our ways. But the world in which we live does not allow us to easily step out of the stream of consumerism. The world in which we live forces us to rely on consumption for our very existence. Long forgotten are the ways of self-sustenance once practiced by our ancestors. Long gone are the days when we lived in symbiosis with our mother earth. And yet there is still hope. It is up to each of us to create the change that our children and our children’s children so desperately need.

Greg Slick joined us from Beacon, New York in early September. He said during the middle of the pandemic Beacon began booming with people coming in as they fled the city and opening businesses and new art spaces. This is not the first time that Beacon has benefitted from artists moving in from the city, and over time, Slick says, the art community has been enriched and the food scene in town is far better than it once was. During the pandemic, Slick had eye surgery and was forced to learn how to work with monocular vision. Though he still has very limited vision in one eye, he has adapted to the shift in depth perception that comes from monocularism. His work before the surgery was somewhat monochromatic, but now perhaps because of his limitation in vision, Slick has begun including tremendous amounts of color in his work. To hear more about his own work, including an in-depth discussion about the work included in this newsletter, listen to the complete interview.

Kristan Kennedy spoke to us in September from Portland where she works as Artistic Director, Curator for Visual Art at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). She told us that throughout the pandemic, PICA continued honoring artist contracts despite not knowing whether anyone would be able to attend shows. Ultimately, they were able to hold exhibitions and invite small crowds enabling them to keep artists paid and engaged. One major change that had to take place was the way in which PICA held its annual Time-Based Art Festival, which typically relies on collective gathering. The pandemic as well as wildfires made it impossible to create this live festival so PICA moved it online. Although in a different format, it is still a very large undertaking with artists coming and going, creating various installations for the virtual audiences. To hear more about this and other aspects of Kristan Kennedy’s role as well as her own artistic practice as a painter, listen to the complete interview.