Geohaptics: Sensing Climate at 516 ARTS Albuquerque, New Mexico

February 17, 2024 – May 18, 2024

February 17 – May 18, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, February 17 | 6-8pm
PERFORMANCE: Mitsu Salmon, Saturday, February 17 | 6pm

516 ARTS presents Geohaptics: Sensing Climate, a group exhibition uniting poignant works from artists who enact a somatic, empathic collaboration with the Earth using the senses, heart, and mind. The title of this exhibit combines “geo,” meaning earth, and “haptics,” referring to the sense of touch. The word “haptic” derives from the Greek word haptein, meaning “to fasten.”

Curated by artist, writer, and educator Daniela Naomi Molnar, Geohaptics: Sensing Climate features national and regional artists that include Athena LaTocha,  Mitsu Salmon, Beili Liu, Ella Morton, Alexis Elton, Jason Francisco, Carol Padberg, Jonathan Marquis, Heidi Gustafson, and Sarah Gerats. Artworks range from investigating the Arctic region to New Mexico’s atomic histories, expressed through organic sculptural forms, video, performance, paintings, photography, and multimedia installation.

Living in the midst of the climate catastrophe, how can we refuse despair and apathy? How might we turn this planetary pivot into a portal to new and better human natures? These questions and more are presented and explored in the exhibition, which hosts a series of public programs (more to be announced soon) engaging sensory experiences and poetic responses to a rapidly changing world.

Glacier Drawing Project at the Danforth

 

https://thedanforth.org/the-glacier-drawing-project

The Glacier Drawing Project is featured in an exhibition at the Danforth Museum of Art in Livingston, Montana. The selected drawings in the show are all from the nearby Beartooth Mountains. Also on display at the museum are the works of The Last Glacier by Todd Anderson, Bruce Crownover, and Ian van Coller.

Downwaste at San Francisco Airport Museum

Terminal 3

Departures Level 2, Gallery 3A

Apr 27, 2023 - Oct 26, 2023

Jonathan Marquis | Downwaste

For his series, Downwaste, Jonathan Marquis visits glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park. He uses materials found at their melting edge to produce cyanotypes that visualize glacial melt and respond to glaciers as active agents of ice, rock, and snow. Downwasting is a glaciological term referring to the thinning of a glacier due to the melting of ice. The term’s use in this series references the production site of the image while emphasizing the loss of these places due to anthropogenic climate change.

The cyanotype is a slow-reacting UV-sensitive photographic process dating to the 1840s. It was commonly used in contact printing and for reprography in the form of architectural blueprints. The chemical formula, which has changed very little since the 1840s, uses a solution of iron compounds, resulting in the recognizable monochromatic blue color from which the process takes its name. To make a cyanotype for Downwaste, Marquis coats a sheet of paper with cyanotype emulsion and hikes with it in a lightproof container through Glacier National Park to the melting edge of one of the twenty-six remaining glaciers. He then places the paper into the glacial runoff and distributes nearby rocks, ice chunks, and handfuls of glacial silt across the receptive surface. Under the sun, the cyanotype exposes, and the melting edge of a glacier draws itself.

In this way, Marquis approaches each work as a collaboration between himself and the glacier, emphasizing the glacier’s presence on the land and the threat of its disappearance. Downwaste invites the viewer to consider glaciers as meaningful actors, whose existence shapes the landscapes that humans and ice coinhabit and depend upon.

Jonathan Marquis (b. 1981) is a multimedia artist, educator, and mountaineer. He received his MFA in 2017 and MA in Art History in 2019 from the University of Arizona. His works have been exhibited across the United States at venues including the Center for Visual Arts in Denver; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson; the University of Arizona Museum of Art; and the Missoula Art Museum in Montana. Marquis received a fellowship for interdisciplinary research from the University of Arizona in 2016, and in 2017 he received the Jane W. Williams Art History Research Prize. He currently divides his time working and teaching in Arizona and Montana.

@SFOMuseum
#JonathanMarquis

https://www.sfomuseum.org/exhibitions/jonathan-marquis-downwaste

Saguaro Cyanotype at Huntington Beach Art Center

"In The Shadow of a Saguaro", 2021, featured in the exhibition “By Degrees”

https://www.huntingtonbeachartcenter.org/virtual-exhibition.html

The Huntington Beach Art Center is delighted to collaborate with artist-curators Luciana Abait and Lawrence Gipe to present By Degrees: Art and our Changing Ecology, a juried exhibition of original artworks addressing critical environmental themes.
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As global warming becomes increasingly evident in our daily lives, artists around the world and in our communities are reflecting, creating and examining the climate crisis in response. By Degrees brings awareness to the severity and scale of our changing ecology as seen through the artist’s eye.
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More than 120 artists submitted new work for consideration. Selected works will display in the 3000 square foot galleries of the Huntington Beach Art Center located in downtown Huntington Beach, California and online in virtual galleries.

Glacier Witness

“Jonathan Marquis puts pencil to paper, shaping the glacier as it claws the mountain before us. Lost in quiet exchange, he doesn’t seem to notice the bellowing grizzlies 1,000 feet away, their roars reverberating throughout the basin. The Vulture Glacier, wrinkled with melt lines and patterned blue ice, is perched opposite him above the lake-lined valley it carved long ago. Marquis sits cross-legged on the rocks, his body hunched, embedding himself in the landscape. The glacier is a lifeworld and Marquis is bearing witness.”

I had the great opportunity to sit down with my climbing partner and environmental journalist Richard Forbes for an interview featured in the winter edition of Mountain Outlaw.

Read the full article here.