It was wonderful for me to be reunited with everyone I built great relationships with during the 2011 Art Lab.

We arrived a week prior to the opening to begin installing our art at B2. I was joined by Fritz Buehner (Boston,MA), Bently Spang (Billings, MT), Ellen Skotheim (Tucson, AZ), and newest art lab artist, Morgan Schwartz (Providence, RI). Reuniting in the Thar meeting room at B2 was intense, we had all talked about how climate change had greatly affected our lives personally. Bently lost his family home on the Northern Cheyenne Nation Reservation in Montana due to the devastating wildfires in June 2012, hundred of homes were lost and over 200,000 acres of land burned. Fritz’s studio in Brooklyn, NY was flooded during hurricane Sandy. Here is Tucson we endured hotter temperatures this summer and we saw an increase in wildfires throughout the southwest.

This past year I was diligent in sharing all that I learned during Art Lab and every chance I could get, I would talk to folks about the importance of water harvesting, the battle against buffle grass, increasing our tree canopy, and climate change. I also took the information into several middle school classrooms and the John Valenzuela Youth Center here in Tucson. I wanted to make sure and include these students into my art installation. When I visited youth I would bring in juice pouches for them to enjoy while they listened to me talk about climate change and then we did an art project. They would cut their pouches in to shapes of leaves and write their names and schools on them for display on my art installation “Planting the Seeds of Hope”.

During the week of installation at B2 I was able to interact with visitors while creating my sculpture. It was wonderful to meet folks from all over the country and a great opportunity to give them information on my sculpture and why art is important to get everyone talking about climate change. CSA cooked for us every night with good delicious local organic ingredients. Being at B2 with all its scientists and wonderful tour guides, Rillito River Project’s Creative Director, and the wildlife and scenery made this experience not only wonderful but inspirational. I felt like our coming together was powerful and that we can all make a positive change in our world.

Opening day of the exhibition was super awesome! I saw new and old faces and it especially felt good when I saw the youth from the John Valenzuela youth center that came to support me and visit B2 for the first time. Seeing their excitement to learn about science, ecology and art was so rewarding. I look forward to continue to network with B2, Rillito River Project and my community to do my part in planting seeds of hope.

November 11^th; after a warm reunion at Lynn Morton’s place in Tucson, Mel Dominquez, Bently Spang, and I are driving nearly a year to the day later in John Newman’s van loaded with food supplies north to Oracle and Biosphere 2. We arrive at 5:30 on a beautiful slightly cool evening and see Biosphere 2 with the glow of the sun’s last light illuminating the other worldly glass structure beyond the now familiar casitas where we will stay for the next week. Ellen and Phillipe are also there and we begin unloading our supplies.

It’s amazing to be back among friends, fellow artists, in this extraordinary place embarking on a project that has been in the making for 6 months. Morgan Schwartz will join us on Tuesday. We also nervously await the arrival of Mary Ellen Strom’s work and support material – sadly, she is not able to be with us. We hear it’s arrived, or about to, but where.

It’s Monday and we are seeing for the first time the spaces where we will install our projects. I feel uncertainty as to whether a site different from one first chosen for my installation will work, but after a short period of assessment the new space looks like it will work and shortly after actually getting to work, all seems good, almost fortuitous.

The week goes relatively smoothly (there are always glitches) and with cooperative indeed collaborative work on everyone’s part Saturday arrives and an impressive show by six artist’s emerged as a voice joining with the researchers from The Institute of the Environment in raising awareness of climate change. Joaquin Ruiz director of Biosphere 2 spoke eloquently about the close relationship between art and scientific research and we are all feeling enormously proud of our participation in this historic moment.

So much credit goes to Ellen Skotheim, her vision and incredible dedication to not only making this show happen, but also to her passionate work on behalf the region’s environment. John Newman’s resourcefulness and extraordinary problem solving abilities, even temper and sense of humor kept things on schedule and Phillipe kept our crankiness at bay with his culinary wizardry and reminded us there is important work to be done developing regional food resources.

Fritz Buehner
12.9.2012

My experience being part of the Rillito River Project was an amazing one. Originally from Los Angeles and now a Tucson resident, The Rillito River Project exposed me to a lot of valuable information about the environment and inspired me to learn more. Our experience began at Biosphere #2. We spoke to many different scientists about their work and our group was given a tour of the biosphere. The thing about the Biosphere is that you have to think of it as a living thing you are able to walk through and semi control. It’s a very cool experiment.

After our 4 days at the Biosphere we headed down to Cuenca Los Ojos in the Chiricahua Mountains. We stayed at the Coronado Ranch, an amazing place. Valer Austin has many acres of land both on the U.S. and Mexican side of the border. She invited us to see what she has done to raise the water table and reestablish native grasses on her land by building simple rock dams called gabions. We also had a chance to see how the border not only keeps people from their natural migration but also keeps animals from their natural migration. Being on the Coronado Ranch and meeting with Valer was a very inspiring experience. We had the opportunity to see what one person can do to make a huge change for the better.

I learned a lot from this experience. With this new knowledge I would like to use my skills as an artist to share it with others. I feel that if people knew more about how climate change is effecting our environment they would be willing to make the necessary changes. The first project I have in mind is to create a painting of the Mexican Free Tail bat. It lives in Tucson six months out of the year and helps our local farmers control the bug population. It also eats mosquitoes and is a delight to have as a summer resident. I would then love to make my painting into a large-scale mural that the people of Tucson can appreciate and learn from. This is the project I would like to do as a direct result of my Rillito River Project, Art Lab, experience.

Many things impressed me during my week–long ART LAB residency. The first half of our experience at the B2 Institute taught me about the quiet urgency of invasive species coupled with drought and imminent climate change in the southwest. Scientists Sujith Ravi, Greg Barron-Gafford and Lindsay Bingham imparted their knowledge about these issues: how native plants have adapted the use of open spaces between them to balance their use of resources and prevent widespread fire damage, and how now Buffle Grass creates connectivity between these—when burning it can travel the length of a football field in 3 minutes flat, destroying native vegetation forever.

Scientist Yoost Van Haren led us on an enthusiastic and insightful tour inside the biosphere, where we learned about many experiments that aim to study these problems in the desert and others ecosystems beyond. Inside B2 I found the powerful loud fans unsettling, but interesting—the fans are placed throughout B2 in order to aid the trees—which must be lifted up with harnesses as there’s not enough natural wind to develop the strength to support their own weight. It made me think of the lack of native sounds in B2 as well. What happens to a tree without participatory insects and birds or even other species? Aside from the lack of physical wind, what happens to ecosystems with a lack of auditory phenomena? I thought of installing speakers inside the Biosphere with recordings of autochthonous sounds to see if it would be possible to measure any changes over time.

During the second half of ART LAB we were guests of Valer Austin at lovely El Coronado Ranch where we saw first hand how it is possible to restore landscapes that have been scarred with over grazing and poor management, ending the week with a hopeful and inspiring picture. The first afternoon and evening we gathered around the patio with biologist Yar Petryszyn to study a collection of mammal skulls and learn about bats. While seated in a circle passing around skulls a number of honeybees kept aggressively buzzing around and landing on me, making me feel a bit wary. Having kept bees for a season I was surprised by my unease around them. “They’re just honeybees! Why so anxious?” I asked myself. The next day along our walks studying gabbiones and trincheras, Valer stopped to show us a few native pollinator plants that were beginning to take seed and described the importance of disseminating information about planting and preserving seeds on both sides of the border. She impressed upon us the variety of pollinators, pollinator plants and seed dispersal methods, and reported that on her land alone there are estimates of 450 native bee species—quite a number indeed!

Valer showing us seed pod

By the end of our stay at the ranch I felt inspired to assist Valer in getting the word out about these pollinators and plants. But I also felt in awe of the sheer numbers of native bees. I remembered I read somewhere an estimate that the Sonoran Desert has over 1,000 species of native bees, making it one of the most diverse bee population in the world. Back home in Tucson, I decided to meet with a few native bee experts to learn more about native bees. UofA insect behavior researcher Jennifer Jandt and native bee researcher and coordinator of Pollinator Partnership Stephen Buchmann confirmed what I remembered and informed me that the largest threat to native bees is not lack of pollen or plants due to grazing or invasive species, but competition from—HONEY BEES! This surprised me and made me remember those pestering bees back at the ranch. My plan now is to create an installation about native bees that will include a bi-lingual take-away pamphlet about native pollinators and their plants that Valer can use apart from my project.

Seed Pod at El Coronado Ranch

Stephen Buchmann's native bee collection

Driving from Tucson north on 77 toward Oracle and Biosphere 2, I’m in awe of the sprawl of rooftops that flank either side of the highway barely visible above the low-lying creosote trees. Knowing this to be a stressed environment I wonder, how can this be sustainable?Tunneling deep into Biosphere’s vast substructure of stainless steel walls, concrete chambers, holding tanks, air filtration systems, still troughs of  condensation, listening to a hydrologist, chemist, biologists, and policy experts tell stories of the regions ecosystems, plant chemistry, water distribution, and invasive plants helped me see beyond the crenellated horizons formed by the sprawling rooftops to something both ironic and promising. Biosphere 2, that began as a utopian experiment to create a portable earth environment for human survival on Mars in some far distant future, now serves as a laboratory for studying and understanding climate that envisions a sustainable environment it in the moment.

When I think about how long scientists have been searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, I see in my mind’s eye the earth, a tiny, but brilliant blue speck sheilded by its fragile atmosphere against the vast fullness of  space as the rarest of things.

The world population is now 7 billion and the competition for resources among all living things fierce.

My personhood will always make me the center of my universe.  The visit to Art Lab, to Biosphere 2, the Chiricahua Mountains, and Sonora desert, with an international group of artists to meet extraordinary people dedicated to revitalising a land degraded through mismanagement was inspiring. Energized at home I can imagine that what may seem incommensurable can be rethought.

To be continued…

A video by Ellen McMahon

As a participant in Art Lab: Border Biosphere Explorations, I spent a few days at El Coronado Ranch in the Chiricahua Mountains. Surrounded by hundreds of acres of grasslands restored by Cuenca Los Ojos Foundation, I began to learn the identifying characteristics and names of some of Arizona’s native grasses. This new knowledge transformed the field of grass in which I stood into a field of several kinds of grasses then into a field of Green sprangletop, Buffalograss Feather fingergrass, Plains lovegrass, Hall’s panicgrass, Poverty threeawn, Blue grama and many others. Looking closely enough to tell them apart, I saw these individual species of grasses for the first time.

During the residency I happened to be reading Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a book by Lawrence Weschler about the artist, Robert Irwin. The paradox between my reading and my experience resulted in “Naming is Seeing | Seeing is Forgetting” a video about how naming and categorizing both sharpens and limits our perceptions of the world, whether we’re seeing as artists or scientists.

I experienced solid ground for the first time at nineteen in a plant taxonomy class at the University of Wisconsin. Gradually as I learned about buds, branching patterns, bark and leaf shapes, the confusing forest of my childhood became a series of individual identifiable trees. In this new world of science a Douglas fir was a Douglas and a White oak was a White oak, This fact was not open for the Fruedian interpretations of my father or the art historical perspectives of my mother.

Now, forty years later as part of Art Lab at El Coronado Ranch I walked through a field of tall dry grasses as Valer Austin, said, “Take a picture. It’s all about the grasses.” As founder of Cuenca Los Ojos Foundation she is restoring hundreds of thousands of acres of the border region to the grasslands it once was before the effects of logging, overgrazing and border wall construction. The over fifteen species of native grasses now thriving on the Austin’s massive ranch as a result of water conservation and management–provide nourishment for their cattle and wildlife of all kinds as it protects the soil from erosion.

The next day I walked through the same field of tall dry grasses with my sketchbook and camera to see how many kinds I could identify. Turns out there were nine species within reach on the hillside where I sat. I looked, made drawings and took pictures and video. I didn’t know what the distinguishing traits were so I looked carefully and recorded everything I could see.

A few hours later returning to the ranch the same field was now populated by groups of fluffy ones, tuft-y ones, three branching ones, many branching ones, reddish ones, sticker-y ones, delicate ones, stiff ones, and fountain-y ones… grasses I had come to know by character but not yet by name. After I studied the guidebook and got help from the Austins I went back out to walk through the same field which had been transformed by my new knowledge into Weeping lovegrass, Slender Grama, Feather fingergrass, Green Sprangletop, Tanglehead, Plains Mountain Blue Grass, Poverty threeawn, Deer Grass, and Squirreltail.

blades of ranch grass

The second day I went out with the intention of drawing and photographing more of the diversity of grasses on the ranch but it didn’t happen. Perhaps I had established sufficient ground the day before. Instead, taken by the gentle movement of the grasses in the soft breeze, I shot video. When my memory card was full I went back to my room and picked up my reading, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler.

Bathed in the contradictions between my reading and my experience, I don’t expect to understand the relationships between seeing, knowing, naming and forgetting any time soon. But now when I take my weekly walks up Tumamoc Hill, I’ll think about Dr. Ray Turner and know I am surrounded by the oldest desert vegetation study plots in the world. When I look out over a section of the desert infested with Bufflegrass I’ll know that all of the native vegetation could be wiped out by a single fire. Now I know that over 100,000 people come to the Biosphere annually, many because of the human drama associated with the Biospherians, and they learn about how useful it is as a model for interdisciplinary climate change research. I have a good sense of the multiple stresses on the Southwest environment and the urgent need for more public dialogue and understanding about the trade offs. Occasionally I will think about every living thing on earth having once been part of a star.

In Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Robert Irwin talks about the reasoning in art making and the logic of scientific research. Is the shift I made between naming the grasses the first day and seeing their character in motion the second a tiny example of the shift between logic and reason? How do the qualities and characters of art and science overlap and differ, support each other and work at cross-purposes? Art Lab has been informative and thought provoking. Maybe the work that comes from the experience we shared will shed some light on these questions and relationships.

There is urgency to understand the environmental changes of the last 150 years of the Arizona-Sonora Border region and it’s north-south corridor.  We were given the opportunity to experience this exigency first hand by Art Lab at the Cuenca Los Ojos Ranch in southern Arizona.  Valer Austin, director of the Cuenca Los Ojos Foundation is a generous, infectious power-house and advocate for environmental restoration.

Austin’s projects located on both sides of the border are immense, inspiring undertakings.  Her vision is practical and intricate.  She foregrounds water restoration as her primary goal to re-establish healthy plant life and animal migration.  We learned the story of this land through observing Austin’s courage and passion to bring it back to health.  Her commitment has motivated me to develop a site project to further understand the environmental history of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands and human and nature’s migrations from a cultural and ecological perspective.

I wanted to be dreaming or imagining Biosphere 2.  The material site extracted my life’s visual memories of cinema, architectural pilgrimages and the beloved, indulgent, unrequited fantasy of having been Bucky Fuller’s student at Black Mountain College.   I long to have been part of Fuller’s “doing more with less” idea and the experiential learning that fueled the dome’s invention, construction and design.

The ideology and purpose of Biosphere 2’s enormous space-frame structure (rife with iconic architectural quotation that looks back and gazes forward) is under transformation.  Biosphere 2’s new mission and research program promises to bridge the gap between its former closed-system laboratory and field studies, focusing on water and climate and energy and sustainability.  This is a bold sea change from the hermetically sealed structure originally built to house experiments that modeled habitats for extended space colonization and survival.

My attention became increasingly divided between the urgent present-day mission of Biosphere 2 and the big imaginative late twentieth century experiment that was embedded with imperialism and utopian vision.  I wanted to grasp the invention and potential of the current twenty-first century model and to understand the important lessons from the grand imaginative experiment that contained plants, animals and humans in a closed system.

 During our first 4 days at Art Lab, Biosphere 2’s present-day researchers and scientists acted as generous, informed guides, the archeologists and anthropologists we met were inspiring, and the artists courageous.  Regardless of our days lecture topic the dialogue always returned to water and the changes in the Southwest since European contact.  Environmental, cultural and scientific histories, domestic public policy as well as global views were examined.  Ideas and possible solutions flowed.

Taoism suggests that we be as flexible as water.  That we become able to let go of old models that don’t work and act with creativity and humility to find new ways of being.  Understanding ways that art can respond to this charge is foregrounding my research and ideas.

This journey into earth preservation feels to be just the beginning of a greater understanding of how I can contribute with my art and my hands to the process of geo-healing. As a Purépecha, an indigenous citizen, I have understood what it is to honor our mother the earth through acts of ceremony and conscious caring of the terrain. The Art Lab adventure opens new ways in which I can directly participate in restoration and conservation as an act of intervention. It is clear that all humankind has much work to accomplish in order for mother earth to prevail for our coming generations.

The Biosphere 2 facility provided a unique opportunity for us to interrelate with on-site scientists. Although it brought the issues of hydrology to the forefront, it did not illustrate the omnipresence of the state of climate change that immediately impacts the human condition on multifarious levels. The biosphere provided fundamental background on current research and methodology.

It was our visit to the Tumamoc desert laboratory with Dr. Raymond M. Turner and his work with archive repeat photography that magnified the imminence of climate change. The longevity study on desert flora was one of the missing links I was looking for. Tumamoc also revealed itself as an ancient sacred site—one that is
directly connected over the millennia to its descendents, the Tohono O’odham. What I
observed was scientific appropriation of the area however, total absence of the O’odham in stewardship and protection of these ceremonial ruins—a place where cultural reclamation needs to occur—yet another aspect of preservation.

The full dilemma became clearer as we moved to the U of A for summarization of what we were looking at in terms of total climate modification. However, not until we stayed at Cuencos Los Ojos ranch, hub of the foundation by the same name, did I observe the actualization of comprehensive restoration initiatives.

Here is where things began to come full circle. Here I witnessed Valer Austin, the human trope for environmental conservation demonstrate how human beings have the power to wound as well as to mend our earth. Valer institutes everything from protection and replenishment of natural resources and fauna to water harvesting and education of the larger world community.

This experience, for me, became the “decisive moment”. Art and labor are tools at our disposal. We, as earth citizens, make it or break it for humanity. Now the question…how do “I” contribute to the healing as resourcefully as possible? This realization becomes the springboard for the creative process pulling me into an exploration of sound, image, movement and more.

While at the ranch, we got to build two small gabions. This physical practical exercise made me appreciate the hard work and the immense effort that goes into this method of land restoration. Earlier that same morning I had listened to Valer talk to me about how it all started and how the system of gabions is working.

She then spoke about her vision for a more peaceful future in the border region where land restoration goes hand in hand with providing meaningful employment for young people, making the drug trade a less attractive business to join. A transcription will be made from the video that documents Valers private talk with me. I may also do some video editing and perhaps use Valers voice over moving images. In an effort to visualize the land restoration project at El Coronado, I plan to create a series of graphic images or posters. The base for these posters will be aerial photographs of one particular area taken at intervals over ten years. Cindy was very kind to identify and pull the images that I will use.

What stands out in my memory from the first half of the ArtLab week is the talk about the Buffelgrass. We learned that Buffelgrass burns at very high temperatures and that the fire can reach a peak temperature of 1600 degrees Fahrenheit.

I contacted a colleague at UIUC and learned that carbon steel starts to loose its structural strength at 900 degrees F. The goal of my experiment is to heighten the awareness of the Buffelgrass invasion by visualizing its properties and opts strategy in taking over the Sonoran Desert. The experiment will be documented by time step photography and video.

An abstract representation of a saguaro cactus with one arm is built using thin steel string of the same type use in gabions. A carpet of Buffelgrass will be creeping in from the side until it covers the ground around the Saguaro. Then it creeps up and stuffs the wire mesh from the inside. A fire starts on the ground and will move up into the saguaro. The wire mesh will loose its strength and the cactus collapses. This experiment is on the dark side. Its focus is on the destructive nature of the Buffelgrass invasion.

Stay tuned for AP’s post.