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This exhibition was originally scheduled to be part of the fifth FotoFocus 2020 Biennial. We are grateful that FotoFocus has generously pledged its financial support to make this show possible even though the biennial has been canceled due to the pandemic. This year’s theme, Exploring Light and Its Contrasts, considers the implicit signification of the word, “light.” According to Kevin Moore, FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator, “Light implies a force of good, and it conjures hope, clarity, and rational thought.” “Flickering” evokes a flashing light, and indicates a warning sign as we exit the Holocene, the geological epoch of climate stability that gave rise to agriculture, civilizations, and our global economy.

The three artists in this exhibition contemplate our entry into the Anthropocene, an era when human activity is the dominant influence on the environment. Climate change is a social justice issue. Accelerating sea level rise and species extinctions, persistent droughts and flooding, food scarcity, lead poisoning -- and other environmental catastrophes that disproportionately impact people of color, and the poor, mostly non-white inhabitants of the “global south” -- are essential considerations in a time of social injustice, healthcare insecurities, and rising political discord.

When Allison Maria Rodriguez starts a project, she examines her intuitive emotional responses while simultaneously doing scientific and historical research. Using old family pictures, digital animations, drawings, NASA weather satellite images, and new footage shot in front of a green screen, Rodriguez draws connections between losses in cultural diversity and declining biodiversity. Elements of her video installations are often rooted in the contingencies of her Latinx and American identities, and how these are echoed in species extinctions and habitat degradation. While the content can be heavy, it is not without a sense of playfulness, mysticism, and hope.

Barry Underwood’s background in theatre influences the ways in which he uses carefully placed lights to interrupt and transform landscapes, creating a proscenium stage for the monocular view of his camera. The glowing lines and shapes reference histories of land use, and the naturally occurring features specific to each location. All of Underwood’s luminous interventions are based on research done during his immersion on the site, usually during an artist’s residency. The resulting images mix available light with illumination from Underwood’s site-specific installations to create uncanny, constructed photographs that tell the story of each place’s present and past.

Kathryn Vajda’s images of icescapes slowly melting in the late winter sun look like futuristic, extraterrestrial colonies. The structures document both Vajda’s deployment of accumulated ice and snow as an unconventional sculptural medium, and the time-based diminution of such a fugitive material in the environment. Upon closer inspection, the images explore the impact of disposable plastic and polystyrene packaging that are the molds from which the artist builds the frozen sculptures. Working with multiple exposures as stacks and layers in Photoshop provides Vajda with the opportunity to move beyond pictorial considerations, to create collages of time.

But time is not on our side. Even though this decade may be the last remaining off-ramp before we are locked into a feedback loop of ever more warming, 2020 allows us to clearly see the possible good we can still do. Congress is spending trillions for COVID economic recovery, but it’s hard to know just how much the US will spend to address climate change. Assuming politicians now understand the reality of an exponential curve, they should apply that awareness to the climate, and lead the way to a future in which subsequent generations can live. I hope that art -- especially that which raises awareness, effects positive change, and calls us to action -- is part of the legacy we leave behind. The planet doesn’t have to crash, we can still pull back before we reach the brink. Will we?

This blogpost contains interviews with the three featured artists in October 2020 exhibition, Flickering at the Edge of Anthropocene, at Blockfort Gallery in Columbus Ohio. CLICK HERE TO VIEW / DOWNLOAD THE EXHIBITION CATALOG PDF. The full interviews are posted BELOW in alphabetical order of the artist’s last name: Allison Maria Rodriguez, Barry Underwood, and Kathryn Vajda.

Interview with Allison Maria Rodriguez via Skype, February 27, 2020, 4:00 - 4:35PM

DLM: A lot of your recent work makes use of collage techniques in multi-channel video installations. Please briefly describe your process of research, gathering images, and creating the videos.

AMR: When I start a project, I pay attention to my emotional responses and I explore those first, for example placing together the images I make or find to see how things feel. I’m usually simultaneously doing research. When I really get down to making the work, I don’t completely lay out how things are going to go until I’m at the point where I technically have to. I shoot a lot of green screen, I use old family pictures, I use images I’ve shot in the past, and I shoot new photos. There’s a decent amount of drawing in the work, and digital animation. I do use some appropriated material, but only for things I can’t access on my own, like pictures of endangered species -- I can’t shoot at the zoo -- as well as hurricane data visualizations, open-source NASA weather satellite images, and even the TV news.

DLM: The 3-channel piece you had in the Boston Children’s Museum was immersive because you have floor-to-ceiling videos that surround the viewer. Before that was installed, how did you get a sense of what it was going to look and feel like?

AMR: I rely a lot on my imagination and the power of math. When I made that piece I didn’t have a studio, and I didn’t own three identical projectors. The only times I had spaces to work in were when I was doing residencies, and then I would have access to spaces for a month at a time. I did a test with three different projectors at a residency before installing at the museum, so I had a sense of what it might feel like, but a lot of my preparation relied on utilizing the dimensions of the space and the exact mathematical possibilities of the projectors. A lot of my practice considers particular spaces, and I build things that are site specific using diagrams and a lot of numbers.

DLM: What impact have residencies had upon the way you think about your work?

AMR: The first residency I did was at The Studios at MASS MoCA. It was important for me because at that point I was working a full time job during the day and teaching at night. I did not have enough time to make Art, and time was the thing I wanted most. The residency introduced me to people who were finding alternative ways to make a living, surviving and building creative careers after graduate school. The program provided entrepreneurial training to help me think about myself as a small business. I don’t love the language around it, but it is a useful way, a different approach to thinking about my practice. That experience did a lot to lead me to the big decisions I made, like leaving my job, becoming a freelancer, doing adjunct teaching, and really privileging my creative practice over everything else - even when I was afraid. I’ve been on this path for only a couple of years, and it was scary at first. To be completely honest, being married makes it easier because my health insurance is provided through my husband’s work. I’m not completely on my own trying to make things happen - I have a partner who also believes in what I do. In other words, I have some privileges now that make this possible, and didn’t have this security previously. I’m lucky. It has been amazing, and it was totally the right decision for me because I’ve been so much more productive with the flexibility of teaching and freelancing. I’m making a lot of work and showing more often. I have focused not just on developing myself as an artist, but also on strengthening my connections in the Art community.

DLM: In your piece, “In the Presence of Absence,” a few of the video stills look like paintings, and source images look like they’re from family photo albums. Some of the pictures depict specific cultural practices like first communion or quinceañera. I can’t help but connect that to the contingency of your Latinx cultural identity. You’re living in New England, a place where the homogenizing pressures of Americanness and consumerism make holding on to other cultures a tenuous prospect, and I equate it to the threat under which endangered species live. In other words, I feel like you’re drawing a line between the loss of cultural diversity and the loss of biodiversity. Is that your intention?

AMR: Yes, exactly. In the projects I’ve been doing lately, I’m trying to find ways of talking about climate change that are more intimate. That particular project developed when I placed a photo of my deceased grandmother next to a Thylacine / Tasmanian Tiger, which is extinct. The photo was of the last animal of its kind left in existence. When I put the two pictures side by side, I had a gut wrenching emotional reaction because I saw something similar in them. I started to explore the distancing I feel from my own culture -- growing up and living in America while my Cuban ancestors pass away -- and I compare that to the divisions we create between ourselves and other species. I think it allows us to drive them to extinction without recognizing our connection to those losses - how losing a species is akin to losing a piece of ourselves. A lot of my work is about creating spaces where people stop for a moment. My installations don’t really have a beginning, middle, and end. They’re more about creating meditative spaces. I surrounded you with beauty, which is a tactic to get you to spend time looking (plus I like beautiful things). I slow down your experience. The installation includes a dress suspended in a wooden framework with abstract moving images projected onto it. It’s final footage of different extirpated species, the last Baiji Dolphin we knew of, the last Thylacine captured on film, and lights behind the dress create an underwater visual effect. I found the dress on Amazon advertised as a “Puerto-Rican-Costa-Rican-Dominican-Cuban-12-year-old festival-dress.”

DLM: Because those are all the same.

AMR: Haha, right. But it’s a handmade dress, so it has a kind of authenticity even though it seems like it was created just for sale online - it’s definitely marketed as commercialized homogenized culture. I felt an affinity with it, like it represented me in some way. It exists somewhere in between “authentic” and “mass-marketed” - which is how I feel as a first-generation that never really fits into any culture, not completely. After I purchased it, I started wearing it around. I was at an artist residency, so it wasn’t as weird as it probably sounds. The dress is in all the videos - which are presented like portraits or my ancestor, extinct species, and different hurricanes that impacted Cuba - and me. I’m wearing it in every channel of the piece, doing different ritualistic movements, many associated with religion. I’m also performing actions that are intended to create a meditative space that might bring someone closer to their own culture - as I struggle to become closer to my culture.

DLM: Do you feel that faith and spirituality play a role in the works that you make?

AMR: I do. Back when I was in grad school, I considered myself to be agnostic, bordering on atheist. Then I visited the Galápagos and I also did an Earthwatch Fellowship Residency in the sub-arctic, in Churchill, Manitoba, and in the process of learning about climate change, experiencing the science first hand, I became more spiritual. By exploring our relationships to the natural world, I think more about the relationships among all beings. I feel a connection to every single aspect of existence - all that we can see and cannot see.

DLM: Talking about interconnectedness, some of your recent work is a team effort. For Vanishing Points,” a piece that was shown on the marquee of the World Trade Center in Boston, you collaborated with Ashley Billingsley. Your installation, “Why Don’t Frogs Sing Anymore?” was part of a workshop taught by Lauren Ewing at a residency in Provincetown. Why is collaboration important to your work?

AMR: I’ve done two collaborative works on the Marquee. It’s hard to do a solid collaboration. I feel like I have to find someone with whom I really click conceptually, and that’s difficult to find. But, working collaboratively, especially with people who use different mediums, challenges me to think differently and explore ideas that I wouldn’t otherwise consider. Every single one of my projects has included a new material or process that I have no idea how to do. I spend time researching how to build this and how to make that because moving outside of what I already know is exciting. Sometimes I have collaborators teaching me. It’s a gift.

DLM: Does the possibility of failure scare you?

AMR: Totally.

DLM: Does that end up being motivating?

AMR: There is a voice in my head that says, “This cannot fail.” It’s like I said about relying on the math, which can feel abstract, and not having the opportunity to build something really large in physical space before a show - and often not being well versed in a particular skill set that I am experimenting with - there is a little fear there that makes me a little uncomfortable, but it is also pretty exciting. For example, the arch that suspends the dress I mentioned, I was building it for the very first time when I was installing at the Fitchburg Art Museum. It’s made of wood and the dress hangs from the ceiling, but what you don’t see is an internal metal framework that holds the dress in shape and keeps it suspended in the arch. Carpentry and metal work are both skills I didn’t have, so I was working with other people to fabricate the piece, to bring it to realization. I did a show at Fountain Street Gallery where I built a big tent-like structure to project into. It was about fantasies and creativity and the healing power of imagination. I drew parallels to the healing of nature alongside the healing of the individual. I built this structure for the first time in the gallery with the deadline of the opening reception as my motivation to figure out any issues that may arise.

DLM: On your website you use the words, “Magical Realism” to describe your work, which is a term I associate with 20th century Latin American literature. Earlier in this conversation you said there’s no clear beginning, middle, or end in your works, but is there an element of fabulist narrative in your installations? Are your works in conversation with the works of writers like Gabriel García Márques and Isabel Allende?

AMR: Journalists who’ve reviewed my shows have compared my work to both of those writers, and I come from a literary background. My undergraduate education was not in visual art, and at the time I didn’t envision taking this path. I am creating spaces where the goal is for people to connect with what they’re looking at. It’s ultimately about how “the real” is fantastic. Everything around us is magical and miraculous, and it’s disappearing. We’re destroying it.

DLM: Does that sense of reverence spring from your evolving spirituality?

AMR: Yes. The thing about Magical Realism is that by creating something fantastical, you can show something that’s more real than real. That feels spiritual / supernatural to me.

DLM: Something that has disappointed me is that facts about climate change, which enjoyed bipartisan consensus in the 1980s, have been buried in favor of opinions that aren’t based in reality. In light of this elevation of ideology over facts, who is your audience?

AMR: After your lead-in, that wasn’t what I thought you were going to ask. I’ve gotten this question before, “How do you make work when everything is so awful, when the facts about climate change are so depressing?” Making the artwork is how I process and manage the reality of that. It’s how I survive. I’ve noticed that kids like my work a lot. Since my work has no linear narrative, I was surprised kids would find it compelling. And they do. Children sit quietly in my installation spaces for long periods of time, and it’s not something that I planned for. I am approaching climate change less from a scientific perspective, and I’m communicating with people who may feel disconnected from the issue. I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed and cut off from their emotional reactions because the numbers are too much or too depressing to think about. I’m probably connecting with people who already understand the realities of climate change but who feel disempowered to do anything about it. How can we see our lives as being part of this conversation? And for those people who are marginalized, I want them to feel like they can have an impact, and like their ideas matter.

DLM: How do you think that creating these contemplative spaces offers viewers a sense of empowerment, even if just for a moment?

AMR: It can be scary, but the idea that every living thing in the world is interconnected makes you a part of something larger than just yourself, and reminds you that you have an important place in it. When people feel seen, when they feel like they belong, that’s empowering.

DLM: What questions do you hope the works raise for viewers?

AMR: I wonder how we might live differently in the world. How can we change the predominant ways of doing things? I want us to consider other species. How can we become intimate with the natural world? I do feel like I want to raise awareness and motivate people to learn more about extinct species, climate change, and what we can do about it; but my bigger questions attempt to shift the colonial way we look at everything as economic resources. I want us to reposition our concept of nature so that it is who we are, and we are part of it.

DLM: Is there anything I didn’t ask about that you’d like to add?

AMR: I see the role of the artist as that of a cultural worker, with a responsibility to effect positive social change and create meaningful human interactions. Like you, I’m building a curatorial practice. For me, it’s another way to connect and collaborate with people, to share ideas. It’s a kind of community organizing, and offers the power to heal.

interview with Barry Underwood via Skype, February 27, 2020, 3:30 - 3:57PM

DLM: In your artist's statement, you say that you research the history of a location, the way the land was used and occupied, and then you respond with installations that you build on-site. Could you describe one specific example, explaining the process of how you transform your research into a visual response?

BU: I usually do my research before I attend a residency. I'll work with whatever information I can get from books and the internet to see what the local industry was like in a given landscape. As for the visual interpretations, I will respond to structures and marks made previously in the scene.

DLM: On your website, the first image that comes up is a linear construction of illuminated tubes in Shaker Heights, near where you live in Cleveland. It's sort of a diamond shape in a grassland on the edge of a forest in late autumn or early winter. What led you to create that shape, with that color of light in that specific location?

BU: The city was about to drain Horseshoe Lake, but before that happened they sprayed herbicides all over the rocks that dammed up the lake to make excavation easier. Horseshoe Lake was created by damming up Doan Creek. The run-off from Doan Creek feeds into Lake Erie a few miles down-stream. Lake Erie has been experiencing excessive algae blooms due to herbicides making their way through waterways like Doan Creek.

DLM: You're describing streams in the landscape that converge, but you've switched that in your piece by creating a form that diverges. It goes two separate ways, like a watershed.

BU: The yellow shape references how waterways are formed by small amounts of water running-off at higher elevations, coalescing to create larger bodies of water at lower elevations.

DLM: Do the lines and shapes you draw in the landscape depend upon the specifics of photography? What I mean is, if we viewed your installations from another vantage point in the landscape, would the circle or the rectangle or the diamond still be legible in the same way?

BU: No. Most of them are set up for just one point of view, but my earlier installations were pieces where I invited people to walk through. The piece I did at MacDowell -- in the ferns and with the bluish collars around the trees -- was an installation you could enter. Same with the piece I did near the Muir Woods. That's a very different experience. Lately, I've been more interested in controlling the vantage point to take advantage of the visual paradoxes that are part of photography. I want to suggest 2 or 3 vanishing points in the images. I have a new digital camera and rig for stitching images together.

DLM: So, are you intentionally playing with perspective when you stitch? Kathy Vajda, one of the other artists in this show, says she enjoys stitching because -- aside from technical and pictorial considerations like what is clearly in focus -- the images become time collages.

BU: I've thought about it like a raised theatre. That's where the front of the stage is low to the audience, and then it gains elevation at the rear, rising to a vanishing point. I also look at Renaissance painting, where background scenery is rendered smaller to create an illusion of depth. That's why I usually position the camera low to the ground and I choose landscapes where I can shoot up or down a hill, or across from a hill. I do this so space is a bit ambiguous. Objects that are in the background tilt forward or appear to approach the viewer, and some objects don't quite match the perspective of the tilted plane they are on. I want to destabilize figure-ground relationships.

DLM: Your work achieves this beautifully. I'm curious to know what you use for the light sources, and how they are rigged or installed in the landscape for your camera?

BU: I use various types of ropes, from 1.5mm Accessory Cord to Static Line, as well as balling wire and SpiderWire. The light sources are EL wire, LED lights. I create a grid-like structure with ropes and pulleys which allows me to suspend the support and also allows me to make adjustments in an X - Y-axis.

DLM: Are you interested in using time-based media like video or live performance?

BU: I experimented in that direction early on, but I'm much more interested in making photographs now.

DLM: During my studio visit with you last fall, you named Richard Long, John Pfahl, Agnes Martin, and several others as your influences. How do you think we should understand contemporary photography in relation to movements like Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Landscape Art?

BU: I make marks in an environment, or rather a space. Richard Long created marks by walking in a landscape, showing how delicate the environment is. John Pfahl created photographic work that pushed and pulled space optically. Agnes Martin made work that was a reaction to a landscape. My conversations with painters and conceptual artists are often about how analogy and metaphor operate in the work.

DLM: Do you think your work is photography?

BU: Not holistically. I make constructed photographic images, but I am also interested in Land Art and painting. The way most people see Land Art is through the photographic image, so it's a kind of record. If you were at MacDowell at that moment I constructed the installation; a viewer could walk through the installation, now, the only way someone experiences it is through the photographic document.

DLM: Are you referring to architectural forms in your works?

BU: I started thinking deliberately about how light interacts with architecture when I was an artist-in-residence at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in 2018. One of the images I made at the Albers Foundation, Linear Construction 5, was inspired by the way light shone through a window. I wanted to recreate the way the light raked across the wall but show it in the landscape with a fallen tree limb. The blue lines are beams of sunlight that I drew in my sketchbook.

DLM: Do you connect your interest in the built environment to the theme of this show, climate change?

BU: When developers and real estate agents look at a lot for sale, they don't see an ecosystem but an asset and resource. They get to make the land whatever they want it to be without regard for what it already is. It could be the future location of a strip mall or a high-rise or a farm.

DLM: Your work can be described as abstract, so to what extent do you want to communicate directly about these concerns?

BU: I'm making poetic gestures. That's why I like Agnes Martin's work. She offers interpretations rather than direct representations. Maybe that's why my work is paid attention to more by painters because I'm not making literal representations of things. Felix Gonzalez-Torres often wanted to transmit the content of his work in an indirect way.

DLM: Gonzalez-Torres infiltrates the unconscious by creating very simple, seductively beautiful installations with everyday objects, often with things people can take away like the piles of candy or printed sheets. Maybe it takes a week or a month or a year before the gallery visitor realizes that they contributed to the dissipation of the thing, to his lover gradually wasting away.

BU: I've noticed the rise of binary, your way or my way, left-right, red versus blue thinking. I also think we are all selfish, so people gravitate toward whatever system of belief is going to give them what they want. Work that is quickly read can be too easy for people to push back against. There are artists photographing industrial run-off, garbage, clear-cuts, and strip-mines. I think that kind of work either shuts people down or is preaching to the converted. Instead, I'm working to be persuasive without being obvious.

Interview with Kathryn Vajda via Skype, February 21, 2020, 1:00 - 1:43PM

DLM: When I saw your work last year at Seton Hall University’s Walsh Gallery, it was like I was looking at futuristic cityscapes built from ice, and some of your titles reinforced that impression. My understanding, based on the studio visit I did with you last fall, is that you’re using discarded packaging materials as molds to create forms from snow and water, and using slush or something as a kind of mortar to assemble them vertically in the landscape to be photographed. Am I describing the process correctly?

KV: That’s pretty accurate. The only thing I would add is that it is very weather-based. I’m watching the forecast all the time, and I work with what the environment gives me. We’ve had a substantial amount of snow this month, but it hasn’t been usable for building. It’s something I’ve been using for the foundations. In terms of photography, I think the part of me that has been hidden in plain sight is that I really do like light. I like how light acts on things, and that’s a really seductive aspect of my practice. I’m casting the forms more from ice these days because I’m really liking how light interacts with it. When I start watching the weather predictions, what I’m looking for are at least three days where it is going to be below freezing all day, so 72 hours of continuously cold temperatures.

DLM: I know in the recent past we had long cold stretches, the so called “Polar Vortexes,” that may have been ideal for you; but this year, it seems like we are experiencing another warmer than average winter. Has it slowed you down?

KV: Actually, I’ve built more this year than ever before because I can’t linger. So, they’re going up and then coming right down. I started using bubble wrap to cast the forms last year, and about one in five of those attempts were successful. I decided to closely investigate bubble packs this year. Now I can nail it and turn out a couple sheets of ice, at least as source material, on every single attempt. So I might have a dozen sheets to work with. Everything is getting more precise and I’m getting faster at it.

DLM: That must feel good.

KV: I’m moving beyond fear. In the early days I didn’t know how the materials worked, how their behavior would change with the weather and intensity of the light. Now I’m more sure-footed about all of that, and I feel confident calculating what I need. I’m more relaxed, and so the things I’m building are more ambitious and I’m having more successes. There’s far less breakage.

DLM: Where do you source the mold-making materials from?

KV: The polystyrene and bubble wrap come from products I buy, and friends sometimes give them to me as gifts. I got two really cool pieces of bubble packaging from my sister-in-law at Thanksgiving. They must have been wrapped around the ends of some large object, and they were sealed to create a pair of unique, ribbed, three-dimensional forms. I’ve used those multiple times. She also gave me a whole sheet of plastic packaging that was used to cushion individual grapefruits in a display. Sometimes I see something at Wegmans and I’ll buy it. I just pay attention. I’m looking for the odd thing, a shape that will reflect and refract light. The more ribs and texture it has, the more I like it.

DLM: What are some of the differences between how forms cast from snow will react with light versus forms made from filling the molds with water and freezing them? Could you describe some of the intuitive ways you’re responding to that?

KV: The snow is really fast to work with. When this first started, I was concerned about the environment and I found something like this lying on the counter [Kathy is holding an empty plastic package for a compact fluorescent lightbulb]. From all my years walking through the ceramic area at Alfred, molds were in the back of my mind. So, I found this piece of trash and I wondered, what if I replace the object, fill the void? It was a beautiful, sunny, winter day, and when I looked out the window I thought, instead of clay or plaster, why not snow? So I went outside and started packing. When I built it I thought, OK, I have a material, water, that makes up 70% of the earth’s surface in either ice or liquid form. And the atmosphere is full of water vapor. It seems like we either have too much of it, like the flooding on the Mississippi or coastal flooding, or too little of it, like what’s happened out west and in Australia. So, I was instantly hooked on the material. And then I thought about plastic. We have a waste problem which is being made worse because plastic production is a by-product of fracking operations. Gas-mining companies are building new cracker facilities -- another one is coming soon to Western Pennsylvania -- that crank out a million tons of raw plastic every year for bubble packs, packaging for pharmaceuticals, car parts, and everything else. The industry has found ways to use every fraction of hydrocarbons. Natural gas is methane and it is thirty times more a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

DLM: Right, it’s shorter-lived in the atmosphere than CO2, but much more potent.

KV: Much, much more. I read a report the day before yesterday that the current level of methane in the atmosphere cannot be explained as coming from naturally occurring sources like volcanoes. It’s from industrial production. The fracking process includes venting the wells, allowing methane to escape into the atmosphere for a week or more until target concentrations are reached for extraction. That’s pure methane going into our air. When companies are going after oil, they flare the methane that comes out first, which produces CO2.

DLM: Driving at night, I’ve seen large flames in the mountains along Route 79 on the way to Morgantown.

KV: It’s going on around us. At that point I was liking the materials -- water in various forms -- and the associations: plastic is a man-made product that is contributing to climate change. I built them, set them up in the snow and photographed them after they collapsed. I figured that would be the end of it, like a sandcastle swept away by the tide. After some time passed, I thought, what are things that show our hubris? What are we really proud of? We’re proud of architecture and cities and the things that we build. So that became the structure for the project in the beginning. As I’ve continued, I’m also kind of documenting the local weather’s impact on these over time while keeping track, in my notebooks, of the global patterns. I’m tired of hearing people say, “We’re having a cold snap, so climate change must not be real.” Making forms from ice at first was a bridge material when I didn’t have adequate snow, and then I saw that forms made from snow slump much faster than ice. It starts to distort and it’s a fight against gravity. When I make them with snow it's hard to do anything that cantilevers out or is planar; but with ice, I can build planes and have something that is tapered at the bottom and wide at the top. I can defy gravity. I think these are some of the material and formal limitations that concern architects, too.

DLM: I remember feedback I got from Wayne Higby when I was an undergraduate student in Freshman Foundation at Alfred. He said I needed to make my sculptures hover. After a semester with him I came to understand that he meant I needed to discover how to make my forms stand and “move” like the bodies of dancers, instead succumbing to gravity like bottom-heavy, inanimate piles.

KV: Yes. That’s part of the appeal, as well as the way sunlight comes through the ice, but both snow and ice do interesting things. Snow rounds, it weakens structurally. Ice, when the sun is low and bright, will first polish and then craze on the south side, so the cracks refract the light.

DLM: Do the forms start bending?

KV: They don’t bend, but the texture which appears on the south side is something I think is beautiful. Ceramicists use this treatment intentionally with certain glazes, and it looks similar on the ice, as well.

DLM: A couple of successes and failures you’ve described, some of the ways they might collapse or slump, remind me of Andy Goldworthy’s film, “Rivers and Tides.” There’s a scene where he’s on a beach in Scotland assembling a sculpture from icicles he’s found on site, using water as cement to glue the pieces together. He’s doing that just moments before dawn, and shortly after the sun peeks above the horizon and rays of light hit the sculpture, the whole thing collapses. When your pieces are out in the environment, do other people interact with them?

KV: I’ve done public pieces, like the work at the View Arts Center in Old Forge. At home, the neighbors come over and they have lots of questions, especially this year. People have been very curious.

DLM: Are you making these in your yard?

KV: I’m doing the work in my neighbor’s yard, who offered it to me because his land sits a little higher with two big corn fields behind it. I like having long sight lines to make the scale ambiguous, so the further any references are from the subject, the better. I’ve built everything really high this year. I’m positioning the camera low and shooting upward. When people look at the images, I want them to wonder where the structures are.

DLM: The camera to subject distances are close and low, creating a scene that looks like something the viewer could enter. We become small figures inside of a landscape of skyscrapers. Is that what you want?

KV: Yes, absolutely. My virtual reality team and I are hoping to work more with that effect this coming summer. Tomorrow I’m playing with a video, it’s going to be a fast warm-up.

DLM: Are you making a traditional, single-channel video for viewing on screen, or are you working on a VR or gamified experience?

KV: This one’s going to be traditional. I’m hoping that if I can pull it off, documenting them as they slump and collapse, then slowing it down for the viewer when we edit. I don’t know what the audio will be like, but in the footage you can hear the tings as little pieces fall off. This will be my second attempt at making a video. The first time we filmed, I noticed that there was a lot of sweating and dripping. Everything started to glisten, and then you could see water flowing. Andy Goldsworthy says he likes resistance and limitations. I always say, “I wish I had a couple of weeks to work with this construction, but there is something about the challenge of working around my circumstances, the weather, the intensity of the sunlight, and figuring out what I can do.

DLM: And the inevitable succumbing to gravity becomes part of the work.

KV: Right, it challenges me to be creative. I try this, I try that, and I say, “I’ve done that enough times and it doesn’t work so let’s rethink it.”

DM: I notice that you titled some of the photos “Old Forge,” and “Avon,” and I’m going to assume those are the towns where those were assembled. Another series is called, “City Scapes.” Is it important for viewers to know where these were staged? Do we need to understand that the forms are created from stuff that usually ends up in the trash? Can you talk about the clues you’re giving us in the titles of the works?

KV: I think both the location and the material are important. Naming the location is a way for me to record when and where it happened. I take dates and locations and go to the National Weather Service and NOAA websites to view records of temperature and weather. It’s not just a way for me to reconstruct patterns from the past, but I can also use the data to compare the local averages to the global averages on a monthly and yearly basis. I also use the weekly and hour-to-hour weather graphs to organize my days. This is really the only guide I have to do any kind of planning. I don’t want the molds to be in your face, but I do think it’s important for it to eventually dawn on the viewer that the shapes are cast from packaging materials.

DLM: Another thing about your process that is important is that you think of this work primarily in terms of printmaking, instead of photography. You are a member of the Printmaking Faculty at Alfred University. Not to reinforce academic silos, but a traditional, modernist approach for a photographer is to use the camera to capture the decisive moment. Colloquially we say, we are “taking pictures.” But you work with multiple image files as stacks and layers in Photoshop to “make pictures.” How does that change the way your images communicate?

KV: When I first arrived at Alfred, they were forming “Expanded Media,” and printmaking was a part of that. At the time we were thinking about it as input devices and output devices, and categories like video and sound and lithography were being let go. So we could be working with video grabs, screenshots, found digital images, scans, and still images shot on a digital camera. All of that was considered source material, and the output was with large format inkjet printers. This way of thinking about things really hybridized my practice here. When we first started the program, capture devices weren’t that sophisticated and we had huge printers. The images were low resolution, and tiling and stitching was the way to create a large, high resolution image from low-end source material. Working that way, I discovered that I could have things going in and out of focus throughout the image, which tied back to my drawings. This year, for whatever reason, I chose to leave the camera’s aperture wide open early in the season, and I’m really enjoying the shallow depth of field in the individual images. Things are either really crisp, or they fall out of focus quickly. Tiling those images allows me to place the sharp edges where I want them to be. It appeals to a sense of image-construction that is common in painting. Coming from a background in printmaking, I gravitate toward using watercolor papers, which create a softer print than luster paper.

DLM: I’m hearing you say that instead of having a recording machine -- through optics and mathematics (and the choices we make in operating it) determine where the plane of focus lies and how deep the focus goes into the image -- we make more subjective, intuitive decisions about line, texture, scale, and focus when we create images by hand.

KV: Right. And then I stretch it out through time, too. I spend twenty minutes to an hour shooting one set-up so I can play with different lighting, focus placement, and other things. I had a graduate student assistant whose background is commercial photography, and he was like, “you’ll be excited when you see how automated functions in Adobe Lightroom will stitch this together for you and balance the color from one image to the next. It will all look the same.” And I said, “No, no, no! That’s not what I want. I don’t want the software to do that.” I want to accentuate subtle temperature changes as I stitch the images together. I don’t want the tiled image to be completely even and seamless. Again, I equate this to drawing. Yes, we are making one image; but, if we are doing observational drawing from life, our bodies move in space, our heads move, our eyes are moving. We do not have a literal fixed point. We are not a single aperture recording information. We’re breathing, our blood is flowing. My works are compilations of that experience. It feels more relaxed.

DLM: But the process you’re describing actually sounds quite tedious.

KV: It can be.

DLM: I can relate to the conversation you had with your grad student. Many of my students suggest ways I can streamline my process, which involves a lot of layer masking. Often these are great suggestions, but what the students miss is that my process is as important as the resulting image. I need to have slow, post-production experiences with the images in order to make sense of them and understand what to do next.

KV: That has always been my experience. For my essence to be imparted in the project, I need time with it. I’m making a lithograph now that is based on the ice structures. It’s been a long time since I've drawn them, and I can see my voice coming through. I see my personality in the photos, too, and that’s not something I can rush.

DLM: When you say “voice” and “personality,” do you mean there is an element of narrative in these works?

KV: I think it’s more formal. Personality is what I build. What I construct from the cast forms is unique from what anyone else would do. The color palette and the range of values are things that I recognize in myself. The colors identify winter.

DLM: Do you think growing up in Pittsburgh has affected the way you see color, especially the muted winter palette?

KV: I don’t know, but I’m sure my reverence and love of that industrial city in the landscape has affected the way I see things. All cities now make a conscious effort to plan urban green spaces, but Pittsburgh has always had tons of green space, even though it was terribly polluted. It was because of the hills. It was just impossible to build on the steep slopes.

DLM: It seems like most of your framed works are roughly 30” x 40.” Why are you printing at that scale?

KV: I want them as close to life size as possible.

DLM: So viewers can have an immersive experience?

KV: Yes, so you can enter the image. When the images are scaled down, like the book, they serve a different purpose than the display prints.

DLM: Why do you think these should exist as photographs or videos instead of as ephemeral sculptures or live performance pieces?

KV: I think there’s a benefit in presenting the documentation as the primary artwork; but often when I’m out there I think, I wish I could grab a bunch of students and get them away from looking at screens so they can see what actually happens out here. I want them to experience the color of morning light before the sun rises. I would like them to see how snow and ice behave as the angle and intensity of the light changes. That’s how we can learn something about our environment. I want students to see how quickly things are changing. My challenge now is having to engineer around it. I don’t know how many more winters I’ll be able to do this. We know there’s going to be a time, probably soon, when people will be amazed that anyone could predictably make art from ice and snow in the southern tier of New York.

DLM: Maybe you could take students to Pollywog Holler in Almond, NY for a winter break short course. Camp out with them there, work collaboratively to build the structures and require them to be up before dawn to shoot as the sun rises. If I were a student, I’d take that class.

KV: There was time, not too long ago, when you could have done that over winter break as an “Allen Term.” But this year, and in most of the past few years, I’ve gotten almost no periods freezing that last at least 72 hours over winter break. We had an early November cold snap, but normal winter weather didn’t arrive until February this year. That makes it really hard for me to use the break productively, and almost impossible to plan something like a short course for students. People here talk about how snow used to pile up in Alfred over winter break, but with a few exceptions, I haven’t seen that.

DLM: That’s my memory. It would stay below freezing and the lake effect snow would keep accumulating. As we shoveled and plowed the sidewalks and roads, we had to pile it higher and higher until it felt like we were walking through tunnels.

KV: And this year we really had nothing. No real snow till February.

DLM: Do you connect the climate catastrophe to other forms of social inequity or structural violence?

KV: I see short term greed being prioritized over our ability to exist. It’s frightening. My husband is the director of the planetarium here in Rochester. I see photos and videos from NASA planetary probes, pictures of what is out there. They just did a show of what it would be like to stand on Pluto and look back at the Earth. The fact of the matter is, we live in paradise compared to anything else out there and we don’t appreciate it. We are not treating the planet like it is paradise.

DLM: I’m not religious, but I experience reverence anytime I walk in the woods, look out from a mountain top, or swim in a lake. I think there’s a profound lack of collective gratitude.

KV: Human beings so easily accept dangerous shifts and changes as norms, and we can lose sight of the sense of amazement and wonder that may be necessary for our survival.

DLM: What ideas do you hope the works will raise for our viewers in Columbus, Ohio?

KV: We can’t negotiate with the laws of physics. We can’t barter a better deal. The planet is not going to bargain with us. There are certain limitations we’ve been able to engineer around, but we can’t alter the properties of matter. Our only hope is to create a collective response. Everyone needs to understand the monumentality of this. We need to put aside our everyday concerns to understand that this is the biggest problem facing all of us. Climate change is a bigger crisis than anything we have ever faced before. We need to collectively process that, and get serious about it.