Skip to main content
Donate

Coming Up: Intelligent Design

By Holly Willis
September 4, 2009
Support Provided By
Easterson.jpg

Cockroaches, pigeons, dogs, cats, ants, bears, baboons, rats, spiders and trout are just a few of the creatures included in the show Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art, which opens tomorrow at UCR's Sweeney Art Gallery. Co-curated by LA artist Rachel Mayeri and gallery director Tyler Stallings, the show features the work of 20 artists and is a stellar collection of projects, including the fascinating "animal cam" videos made by Sam Easterson, who attaches tiny cameras to the bodies of animals to gather fascinating footage, and Jim Trainor's quirky, sublime animations that unite hand-drawn imagery with unusual, often highly sexual narratives. Beatriz da Costa's work with pigeons is also included; the artist outfits pigeons with sensing devices and enlists their help in tracking local pollution. LA-based artist Sean Dockray is represented in the show with his video portrait of Argentine ants; to make the video, titled Ameising 1, Dockray created a software app that captures the paths of the ants. The resulting video is compelling at once as an unfolding motion drawing and as a scientific study.Hilja Keading will show her video installation The Bonkers Devotional and Mayeri presents Primate Cinema, a video that juxtaposes footage of baboons with that of humans reenacting the animal imagery. Rather than delineating human and animal, culture and nature, the paired videos instead blur the boundaries, pointing to the impossibility of seeing the "natural" without the lens of the cultural. And that notion seems to capture the show as a whole. Can't get to UCR any time soon? Go to the Web site, click on "images," and look for the video excerpts included on many of the artists' pages. While it's not as good as being there, it's still pretty great...
Image: from animal cam video by Sam Easterson

Support Provided By
Read More
An oil pump painted white with red accents stands mid-pump on a dirt road under a blue, cloudy sky with a green, grassy slope in the background.

California’s First Carbon Capture Project: Vital Climate Tool or License to Pollute?

California’s first attempt to capture and sequester carbon involves California Resources Corp. collecting emissions at its Elk Hills Oil and Gas Field, and then inject the gases more than a mile deep into a depleted oil reservoir. The goal is to keep carbon underground and out of the atmosphere, where it traps heat and contributes to climate change. But some argue polluting industries need to cease altogether.
By Alejandro Lazo, CalMatters
Gray industrial towers and stacks rise up from behind the pitched roofs of warehouse buildings against a gray-blue sky, with a row of yellow-gold barrels with black lids lined up in the foreground to the right of a portable toilet.

California Isn't on Track To Meet Its Climate Change Mandates. It's Not Even Close.

According to the annual California Green Innovation Index released by Next 10 last week, California is off track from meeting its climate goals for the year 2030, as well as reaching carbon neutrality by 2045.
By Alejandro Lazo, CalMatters
A row of cows stands in individual cages along a line of light-colored enclosures, placed along a dirt path under a blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds.

A Battle Is Underway Over California’s Lucrative Dairy Biogas Market

California is considering changes to a program that has incentivized dairy biogas, to transform methane emissions into a source of natural gas. Neighbors are pushing for an end to the subsidies because of its impact on air quality and possible water pollution.
By Emma Foehringer Merchant, Inside Climate News