Today is Earth Day—though maybe can we make it Earth Week? Earth Month? The planet deserves much more than a day. In an attempt to avoid doom scrolling, I wanted to share work by artists included in the exhibition Nature on Notice: Contemporary Art and Ecology (on view at Charles White Elementary School through August 2, 2025), which focuses on the ongoing changes to our natural environment during the Anthropocene—our new normal—illuminating the need for both artistic and scientific imagination in the face of threats to our ecology
Let’s start at the top of the world, shall we?
In April 2022, Tristan Duke set out on an arctic expedition, sailing north of the 78th parallel on a three-masted tall ship in search of crystal clear, ancient glacial ice. He used a tent as a large camera that could hold giant 4 × 8 foot negatives and formed custom ice lenses made from the very glaciers he would then photograph—on ice, of ice, imaging ice. As he explains, the glaciers “are giant lenses compacted under the weight of eons, polished by wind and snow. In its massive fragility, the glacier’s gaze suggests a perspective both larger in size and longer in duration than our limited view.”
Lucas Foglia, meanwhile, traveled around the world to find stories that evoke our need for spending quality time in nature. Each image in his Human Nature series is set in a different ecosystem—city, forest, farm, desert—documenting visually what neuroscientists have demonstrated scientifically: time outside is vital to human health and happiness.
At the top of this post we see Kate, who wears an EEG cap, checking her brain activity to see how being in nature affects her mood. Part of a study entitled “Cognition in the Wild,” she sits by a river in rural Utah. In the photo above, Hafiz and Stasia enjoy a moment on the 40th floor of a highrise hotel in Singapore, experiencing nature even in the middle of a very dense and very vertical city, one that has been highly proactive in employing green tech like parks in its urban spaces.
Another hotel in another city: startlingly blue, unnatural waters are foregrounded in Connie Samaras’ image of a luxury hotel in Dubai, located in a desert region along the Persian Gulf, which, through desalination, is its only water source. This “lake”—a pool not actually meant for swimming in, only viewing—speaks to an atypical consumption of a vital natural resource. Combining the everyday with the surreal, Samaras makes visual the imbalance of resources, creating a dissonance with the image of Dubai as a promising city of the future.
Closer to home, Cara Romero, a member of the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Tribe, defines her practice as one that brings Indigenous culture into the present—contemporary storytelling about her culture’s ongoing relationship with nature that is respectful and reliant, with imbalance on one side leading to imbalance on the other. In the theatrical Water Memory, figures in ceremonial regalia are portrayed suspended underwater, illuminating the substance’s spiritual aspects. In the ambiguity of their pose (floating up or sinking down), she also alludes to the supernatural in everyday life that is an equal part of the Indigenous understanding of the universe.
See all the work on view in Nature and Notice and join us in for further discussion about the state of our planet’s health and well being on Saturday, April 26, at Earth Edition, a climate-minded community mixer where artists, activists, and community leaders will share strategies to inspire collective dreaming and reframe our climate future, presented alongside the exhibition at Charles White Elementary School. Here’s to you, Earth—we're thinking of you.