Selected Catalog Essays
Human / Nature
The Weight of Our Actions on the Natural World
Illinois State Museum, Springfield and Lockport 2021-2022
- Douglas Stapleton, Curator
Human | Nature
Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman, Hector Duarte, Lora Fosberg, Jin Lee, Nora Moore Lloyd, Andrew Young Human | Nature brings together artists who address our relationship to the natural world as the source of our sustenance. How do we see that relationship? Do we think of resources as endless and only for our benefit? Do we see ourselves connected with the natural world or separate from it? These artworks look at our perceptions and beliefs about this relationship, and the consequences of our actions. |
left to right: museum director Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, Barbara Ciurej, Jin Lee, Andrew Young, curator Doug Stapleton, Lindsay Lochman, and Nora Moore Lloyd at the ISM Springfield opening.
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Andrew Young, All This Land installation with
Cartoon Box Trap sculpture in foreground. |
Nature provides us with life, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. It is also the food we gather or grow and the materials we harvest for shelter, clothes, and tools. Humans see nature as a resource, something we use for a purpose. In our modern, industrial world, we think of resources as something to extract, remove and exploit, actions that move in one direction towards us.
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Humans impact the natural world with documented consequences. Deforestation, soil depletion and erosion, habitat stress, mass extinctions, pollution and climate change are the big stories of our lifetime. Current thinking urges us to understand our connection with nature as a relationship based on shared necessity. We need the resources that nature provides, but we also need to give in return, like any good relationship. It is the work of our lifetime. What is that work? To give back, and understand the return needed for what we take.
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The All This Land portion of the Human / Nature exhibition is comprised of nine wall pieces
and five sculptures. |
And the word for that relationship is ecology—the knowledge of our intertwined, vital connection with other living beings and our environment. When we see ourselves as a part of a relationship with the natural world, part of the ecology, then we can take action to care and protect it.
Doug Stapleton Associate Curator of Art |
Andrew Young
All This Land Andrew Young’s artwork speaks to how we use and classify the materials we take from the earth, and how that reflects what we care about and understand about nature. The work in All This Land speaks to consequence—how the well-being of the planet is affected by our actions. Young focuses on mineral extraction, using the waste created by mining to grind down into the pigments for his work. He also brings along the stories of the harm brought about in our actions on the earth. Young sees us at a turning point in our relationship to the landscape. No matter if one’s perception of nature is romantic, emotional, or practical, dramatic change is underway. All This Land uses a little humor, theater, abstraction, and recovered objects to address a more somber awareness that the Earth’s fragile systems and resources are not inexhaustible. All This Land was first presented at The Chicago Academy of Sciences / Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in 2018-2019. |
Young’s drawings use coal and calcium carbonate derived from mollusk shells to create images that are a meditation on the connection between energy consumption and life. Plants consume sunlight. Coal is created from plants through immense geological pressure; another energy process. Coal is burned to run our machines and heat homes. We eat plants and animals for calories to fuel our body. Nature is about energy. How do we produce energy and what are the consequences for our environment?
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Accompanying the Human / Nature exhibition were two of Andrew Young's earlier artworks, both part of the Illinois State Museum's permanent collection. On the left is an untitled egg tempera painting on panel made in 1989, his last year as a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was acquired by the museum in 1990. To the right, is a collage of hand-painted papers and raw mineral pigments. From Young's Sky and Shade series, it was completed in 2006.
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