inside/outside

Elena Soterakis

"Wilderness Inferno" 18" x 24" Oil and collage on panel. Image courtesy of the artist.

Words like “contamination,” and “impurity” immediately conjure images of destroyed natural habitats, specifically the degraded landscapes that are unique to our contemporary times. Through painting and collage, my work depicts anthropogenic impacts on the natural environment, illustrating human-caused environmental disturbances. The polluted passages that I create with collage highlight the “otherness” of human-made waste, in contrast to the natural landscape that is painted in oil.

Rather than attempting to persuade the viewer through visual idealization, I purposefully excavate our negative impacts on the landscape. I begin by painting a master copy and then collage 21st century waste materials over the image, desecrating the once picturesque scene - an image that was constructed to appear pristine but was often exaggerated and misleading. The integration of collaged materials into the painting alludes to the often-invisible ecological impacts of consumer culture and challenges the fraught history of American landscape painting. 
​
In a contemporary context, my work resides at the intersection of romanticism and activism. It is a call to action against our throwaway society and extractive industries in an era of environmental neglect. I infuse my work with strong emotional content while challenging cultural and ethical norms. This "Ecocide" series highlights unchecked consumerism, corporatism, and extractive industries - all of which are destroying the planet.
​

"When the Party's Over" 18" x 24" Oil and collage on panel. Image courtesy of the artist.

​Elena Soterakis is a Brooklyn-based visual artist exploring environmental degradation and the perils of climate change. In an era of environmental neglect, Soterakis’ artwork depicts 21st century anthropogenic landscapes. She has participated in exhibitions in Tokyo, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Houston, and has exhibited extensively throughout New York City. Soterakis is a founding member of the international space art initiative, Beyond Earth, a multidisciplinary artist collective that expands the possibility of art on Earth and beyond. By linking art, space, and biology Beyond Earth builds global awareness of our home planet and explores creativity in the far reaches of Outerspace.  Soterakis the is Co-Founder and Director of BioBAT Art Space, an exhibition space in New York City entirely dedicated to the intersection of Science, Art, and Technology located in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, at the biotech incubator BioBAT Inc. Soterakis received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art and her BFA from The School of Visual Arts.

---

Michelle Robinson

"Melt" 22" x 30" Archival pigment print. Digital image with composited element made of wood, encaustic wax. Image courtesy of the artist.

​A domestic secret or trauma, once revealed, shifts the concept of home from the comfort of nostalgia into the realm of the uncanny: a place of intellectual uncertainty, where the once-familiar now feels unfamiliar. Once known, a secret can’t be unknown; it contaminates memories and intrudes upon relationships. Secrets revealed in the digital space can replicate and spread with infinite ease; they are copied, shared, and impossible to eradicate once established. The resulting fracturing of self; the oscillation between states of longing and loss, sentimental memory and tainted knowledge, is the focus of my current work.

My practice is a combination of technological and traditional methods of making, creating digital composites of landscape and (un)homey objects. I use computer graphics to generate simulations of domestic furniture and structures, and hand-build dollhouse miniatures to reference a different timescale and physicality. By scaling up tiny, corrupted replicas of domestic objects and situating them, vulnerable, in a hostile environment, I turn the inside out. Like the miniature, the desert is a space of arrested time, and my proxy objects, whether simulated or built by hand, are ruins in the landscape.
​

"Sick" 40" x 60" Archival pigment print. Digital image with composited element made of wood, paint, thread, cheesecloth. Image courtesy of the artist.

Michelle Robinson received her Bachelor of Environmental Design in 1991 from Texas A&M University and continued with graduate studies at Texas A&M’s program in Visualization, producing animated short films that were shown at the Walker Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, Imagina in Monaco, and The AFI National Video Festival. She also holds an MFA in Visual Art at New Hampshire Institute of Art and exhibited her thesis body of work at the Sharon Arts Center in Peterborough, New Hampshire. She has had her work published in Diffusion of Light, The Hand, and Precog magazine. Exhibition highlights include a curated show dealing with the urban environment at the Brand Library in Glendale, CA, a solo show at the Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, CO, and a forthcoming solo show at the Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery at Coker University in 2021.

---

Ramey Newell

"From the deep ground" 18" x 22.5" Giclee print. Image courtesy of the artist.

"Manifest Obscura" complicates aesthetic, historic, and ecological dimensions of the American West. The soft, dreamlike pinhole images immediately frustrate the viewer’s desire to consume and fetishize a detailed landscape as sublime “Nature” – a desire central to the tradition of large-format landscape photography. Precision is eschewed in favor of ambiguity, and the landscapes are familiar yet unidentifiable. Titles hint at specificity by appropriating place descriptions from archival settler journals written during a period of American westward expansion that violently subjugated human and nonhuman beings, reducing vast and complex ecosystems to inventories of exploitable resources. These oddly poetic descriptions reference deeply troubled histories, yet still cannot clearly situate the image in time and space. Language, like image technology, fails to fully inscribe the landscape.
 
Failure of inscription and the shortcomings of human understanding are also indicated by the biological processes at play. Microbes assert their own image of the world in place of ours, reconfiguring minerals and photographic chemicals to further obscure an image-world we thought we knew. Only here does visual detail emerge, but this intervention is also partial, as is our access to it. The specific microbes and processes as play remain inaccessible; all we can see are their traces. Immense spatial and temporal scales, both human and nonhuman, collapse in on themselves. Control is ceded to chance as agency shifts to non-human interlocutors. Lifeforms and image, locked in material embrace, both cultivate and destroy the other.
​

"Sharp and sibilant murmur" 18" x 22.5" Giclee print. Image courtesy of the artist.

​Ramey Newell is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores issues relating to ecology, climate change and mass extinction, scientific epistemologies, anthropocentrism, the mythologies of the American West, and the expectations of documentary image. Her photographic and moving image works have been shown in festivals, galleries, and museums throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, including at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, Canada, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She holds a BFA in Photography from New Mexico State University, a graduate certificate in Interdisciplinary Documentary Media from the University of Colorado, and an MFA in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia. She currently lives, works, and teaches in British Columbia.

---

Steph Mantis

Image courtesy of the artist.

In this series "Words of Reflection," the use of contrast highlights the unseen power of language. By reframing these ubiquitous phrases we question our relationship to them, and in the process, increase our understanding of “relationship” as a concept itself.

Within our BELIEFS, there is always a lie. By believing in one thing, we inherently accept that what is not that, is a lie. This binary relationship limits and deceives us. It's not a matter of choice- each half needs each other to exist. In this piece, the "lie" is left blank, or as perceived in opposition to black, "white," to remind us that the lies within our beliefs often present themselves to us as innocent.

The use of contrast in “CLIMATE CHANGING” shows that for there to be healthy climate change, we as individuals must change. With unprecedented challenges facing our external, physical world, it seems logical that we find ourselves further divided internally and ideologically; one extreme is countered by the other. Nature is perpetually balancing itself. To heal or balance our external outer world, we must also balance our internal emotional world. While “climate changing” in the external sense has a negative and anxious connotation, “climate changing” in the internal sense has a positive and relaxing connotation.

“PRACTICE” is a reminder that if we don’t act, we ultimately pay the price. The message is within the word itself. As it relates to climate change and beliefs, if we don’t act now, we will pay the price later. ​
​

Image courtesy of the artist.

Image courtesy of the artist.

Learn more about Steph Mantis.

---

​Shanna Merola

"Merola_Uranium_1" 25.5" x 37.5" Archival inkjet pigment print. Image courtesy of the artist.

​The images in "We All Live Downwind" are culled from daily headlines – inspired by global and grassroots struggles against the forces of privatization in the face of disaster capitalism. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein writes about the free market driven exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries saying, “the original disaster - the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane - puts the entire population into a state of collective shock”. The scenes in "We All Live Downwind" have been carved out of dystopian landscapes in the aftermath of these events.  

On the surface, rubble hints at layers of oil and shale, cracked and bubbling from the earth below. Rising from another mound, rows of empty mobile homes bake beneath the summer sun. The bust of small towns left dry in the aftermath of supply and demand. In this place, only fragments of people remain, their mechanical gestures left tending to the chaos on auto. Reduced to survival, their struggle against an increasingly hostile environment goes unnoticed. Beyond the upheaval of production a bending highway promises never ending expansion - and that low rumble you hear to the west is getting louder.  ​

"Merola_Toluene (C7H8)_5" 21.5" x 31.5" Archival inkjet pigment print. Image courtesy of the artist.

Shanna Merola is a visual artist, photojournalist, and legal worker. In addition to her studio practice, she has been a human rights observer during political uprisings across the country - from the struggle for water rights in Detroit and Flint, MI, to the frontlines of Ferguson, MO, and Standing Rock, ND. Her collages and constructed landscapes are informed by these events. Merola lives in Detroit, MI, where she facilitates Know-Your-Rights workshops and coordinates legal support for grassroots organizations through the National Lawyers Guild. She has been awarded studio residencies and fellowships through the MacDowell Colony, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Kala Institute of Art, the Society for Photographic Education, the Puffin Foundation, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. Merola holds an MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been published and exhibited both nationally and abroad. 

---

Susan Hoffman Fishman

"Covid Look-Out 1" 10" x 10" Inkjet print on paper. Image courtesy of the artist.

During this great global quarantine, our behavior has been shaped by the contamination of the world. We have separated ourselves from others in order to escape the virus outside, which is invisible, soundless and deadly. As a result, we have been spending much more time looking out of windows than we ever have before. The window has become the safe way for us to see the world without touching it and to reflect our inside world out.
​
Each of the photographs in this series portrays a window upon which segments of my own paintings and family portraits have been reflected. In some cases, the window in the picture plane is a tiny rectangle of light that seems very far away to emphasize the isolation we must endure; in others, it has absorbed the colors of the image being reflected and been transformed. Somewhat out of focus and jarring, the photographs exude a sense of nostalgia, loneliness and longing. By joining reflections of my own paintings and family photographs with images of my own windows, I am stressing that during times of crises like this one, as we try to make sense of our changing reality, art can serve as a life raft and hold us up while we get our bearings.
​

"Covid Look-Out 2" 10" x 10" Inkjet print on paper. Image courtesy of the artist.

Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist and writer whose work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Her latest work focuses on water and the climate crisis.  With her monthly column, “Imagining Water,” Fishman is a regular contributor to the blog, Artists and Climate Change , which documents the work of visual artists, playwrights, novelists, poets, dancers, public artists, musicians and performers, etc. around the world who are focusing on the topic of water and climate change.  Fishman Is also the co-creator of two large-scale, community-based, interactive public art projects: The Wave, a national interactive installation which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water, and Home, which calls attention to homelessness and the on-going need for affordable housing in our cities and states. To date The Wave has been installed in 24 museums, galleries, libraries, parks, schools and festivals.  

---

​Yujia Bian

Titled “Why Look at Animals?” the portable installation questions the means of display in natural history museums as ways of viewing and understanding nature. For these museums, specimens are often arranged in display cases as dioramas, accompanied with a habitat environment. In displaying environments under “natural” conditions, “liveliness” becomes a necessity in making a convincing display. By mimicking and representing nature museum displays via a realistic approach, the installation interrogates dominant museums’ understandings of environments. Consisting of 28, 1-cubic-inch capsules, each cube in the installation contains an animal trapped within its designated habitat. The selected animals represent the range of species in museum collections: from polar bears, rhinos, bats, and foxes to underwater creatures such as dolphins, octopuses, and sharks. As with the grid-like organization of the museum of curiosities, these cubic capsules are arranged to fit the rectangular boxes, forming a gridded display of animals inside individual cells.

"Why Look at Animals" 4" x 7". Grass, Sand, Plastic, Glycerine, and Rubber. Image courtesy of the artist.

​Yujia Bian is a researcher and artist in landscape and architecture. Her works focus on the broad connotations of the environment. Her recent experiments explore the so-called nature’s conceit through metaphor, humor, satire, and myth. These works interrogate the regulations, interpretations, and understandings of the environment at small scales, and try to capture moments where nature escapes human’s best attempt to control.

SciArt Lifetime Digital ​Subscription

$50.00

Buy Now

Subscribe once, be set for life! One time payment, no renewals.

​Upon purchase, your digital access code will be automatically emailed to you.

For gift purchases, simply forward or print out your confirmation email.