Reap

Reap: The Environmental Unsustainability of the American Food Machine

What does it look like to have a tree scream out in desperation? In October, C Emerson Fine Arts in St Petersburg, FL will exhibit paintings created by Lee Lee which are driven by concerns about our nourishment, as well as a fear for the resulting degradation of the environment.

Oil makes up the foundation of the American food machine. Our reliance on fossil fuels in food production is immense. Not only are they used extensively in farming and transportation, they are also the catalyst which fixes ammonium nitrate to make chemical fertilizers. Dominating this installation are paintings depicting an oil refinery in the rain. The size emphasizes our reliance on oil, while the execution questions the effects of fossil fuels on the cleanliness of our natural resources through paint stains dripping into the water.

Flying above Midwestern plains, the crop circles and grids of industrial farms are an imposition on ancient grasslands. The only remaining natural elements are the occasional rivers whose fingers branch up into the geometric landscape. The Crop series consists of dormant fields under a light dusting of snow to reflect how our process of conventional farming is leaching nutrients from the earth while filling our waterways with poisons, which will ultimately cause infertility in our land. Pairing the Crop landscapes with interiors of an abandoned Intercontinental Ballistic Missile silo illustrates a direct link between our systematic food production and war. After WWII, the US Agriculture department encouraged farmers to spread ammonium nitrate, leftover from bomb construction, onto their fields as fertilizer. Today we are deeply entrenched in a war in an attempt to feed our oil habit, which in turn sustains the industrial food machine. It is disturbing that our "nourishment" is born out of war and continues to manifest such destruction to this day.

Continuing down the path of food production, a series of watercolors manifests the haunted spaces of an abandoned slaughterhouse. The energy it takes to raise meat takes up the bulk of grain that we produce. In his book, Anger, Thich Nhat Hanh describes how traces of energy are absorbed through consumption. For example, if an animal leads a miserable life, then we absorb that misery when we take their meat into our bodies. This series is complimented by a set of roadkill drawings which serve as a poignant reflection of our attitude towards animal life; these wild animals lay as part of our refuse, disregarded as we speed along the highways of our own lives.

Both nitrate and carbon emissions from America's conventional food machine make a huge contribution to climate change. One of the most visually striking symptoms is emerging as a new virus found in aspen trees. The red gashes in the thin skin-like bark of the trees appear as flesh wounds. More than a literal illustration of a shifting environment, the corporeal appearance of the trees make a connection to our own bodies. As our health is intricately connected to the health of the environment, the violence conveyed through the process of using a shotgun in this series reflects the violence we are wreaking on ourselves.

The built structures portrayed here are in various states of decay; a return to nature. This represents the beginning of a shift in attitude of many Americans who are concerned about the adverse effects of the way we produce and consume food. Despite the prevailing theme of environmental demise in this body of work, we can hardly destroy the environment. Ultimately the world will survive; the question is whether or not humans will be around to enjoy it. The survival of humanity will be determined by the attitudes and approaches we take towards interacting with the environment now.

Exhibit runs October 2 - 30, 2009

C Emerson Fine Art
909 Central Avenue Saint Petersburg, Florida
http://www.c-emersonfinearts.com
cemersonfinearts@gmail.com
727-898-6068

Overview: http://www.lee-lee.com/release/reap.shtml

The Cradle Project

As the growing child within my womb tumbles around and gently prods my rib cage, I lash another sun bleached rib bone to the rusty frame of an abandoned baby carriage. How fortunate is this child within me, who will be born to a full breast instead of being immediately confronted with the severity of famine.

The carriage I am working on serves as an armature for a sculpture being built for The Cradle Project; an extraordinary gathering of over 500 artists who are responding to the plight of countless children in Sub Saharan Africa. Naomi Natale, a sculptor based in Albuquerque, was inspired to build this exhibit after photographing children who lived from a dump in Kenya. When a couple of them vanished, it occurred to her how close they lived to death on a daily bases and wanted to take action in our own land of plenty.

My time spent time in Northern, Southern and Eastern Africa has given me the opportunity to be inspired by the power that emanates from the land itself and which manifests through the people who dwell there. I have not witnessed such intense struggle any other place in the world. These struggles have entered in my work through building fine arts exhibits in response to the problem of AIDS in Africa, as well as collaborating with several artists for exhibits in regards to Genocide at the Mizel Museum and the International Conference of Genocide Scholars in Sarajevo in 2007. The struggle and perseverance are subjects that remain very close to me, and I plan to instill my first child to both the power and sorrow in Africa.

My baby’s head is currently nestled within my pelvis bone; his first cradle. Turn a pelvis bone upside down and it is transformed into an ominous mask-like form. This death mask hovers over the cradle I built for The Cradle Project, to reflect the death that hovers constantly for children being born into famine and strife in Africa.

The Cradle Project will open on Saturday, June 7th in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This historic and unprecedented art installation –two years in the making– will feature over five hundred cradles and cribs made by artists from around the world using solely scrap and recycled materials. Using the symbolism of empty cradles to represent the lost potential of an estimated 48 million children orphaned by disease and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, The Cradle Project is designed to provoke art into action. The ultimate mission is to promote awareness about this crisis and to raise financial support to help feed, shelter, and educate these forgotten children. Set against a towering backdrop of falling sand, these empty cradles will speak volumes about the permanence of loss, as children’s lives and potential - these cradles - become buried.

WHAT: The Cradle Project Exhibition and Opening Reception
WHERE: The Banque, 219 Central Ave NW, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
WHEN: Exhibition – June 7-28, 2008, Thursdays through Saturdays, 1 pm – 5 pm
Opening Reception – June 7, 2008, 12pm – 5 pm
WHO: The Cradle Project, featuring cradles made by artists from around the world.

Love and War: Myanmar

Love and War: Myanmar

An effectively destructive tool, the process of using a shotgun speaks to the violence inherent in war. The penetration of the shot through a surface holds a highly sexual quality as well. In the past, I’ve painted flowers on shot up surfaces to convey a feminine delicacy that has been aggressively torn up by a very masculine tool.

Similarly contrasting these violent grounds to delicate subjects, I feel that children, especially young girls, are a poignant subject. When I was in Myanmar (Burma), I found the people to be incredibly gentle and compassionate. Strong influence from their Theravada Buddhist tradition results in passive acceptance; perfect breeding grounds for mass exploitation and extermination. Beyond the mass rape practiced by the military junta there, “Burma is a country of origin for trafficked persons, primarily women and girls seeking labor in Thailand as factory workers or household servants who are sold to brothels for sexual exploitation.”

Myanmar exists under one of the most severe regimes today. Attention from the world is brought there now by the monks who are, for the moment, allowed to demonstrate on a large scale. It’s an interesting contrast to the student demonstrations just prior, which were immediately ousted. In fact there seems to be little respect for youth by the junta. “Burma has more child soldiers than any other country in the world,” states Human Rights Watch, “accounting for approximately one-fourth of the 300,000 children…participating in armed conflicts across the globe.” Further abuses outside of the military persist: Burmese law allows capital punishment of minors and encourages sentenced juveniles to serve their punishment in work camps, where many are literally worked to death.

Instead of manipulating images of children to induce sympathetic feelings in the viewer, I aspire to create an honest reflection of the full range of emotion that defines these kids as individuals. I also think it important not to convey these children as victims as it denies respect of their strengths. In reality, some will die, some will be tortured, some will profit, some will survive, and some will do horrible things to others in order to survive.

While in Myanmar, I photographed a classroom of children to reflect this range of possible roles they will take in their lives. Traditionally they wear a light colored soil on their faces which gives them a very ghostly appearance. I’ve started a series of oil portraits painted on shotgunned mahogany plywood which breaks apart in very delicate lacy fragments. The figures are defined as much by erasure and aggressive scratching as by building paint through delicate brushwork, the process as a whole reflecting the traumatic existence of this community.

*Itallics are quoted from the Genocide Watch website: http://www.genocidewatch.org/alerts/burma.htm

Aspen

One of the largest and longest living organisms in the world, the aspen has started to die on a mass scale.

An organism in constant flux, elder aspen trees often die while young shoots continually spread along the tendrils of the familial roots. Now they are acquiring a disease I have never seen before. The appearance of infected aspen is disconcerting. Because they bleed red sap through their thin skin-like bark, the trees attain a corporeal appearance. Sometimes the infections look like flesh wounds.

Growing up in the Colorado Rocky Mountain region, it has always been my favorite tree. It is with tremendous sadness and concern that I am recording the effects of this infection.

While my work has focused on social concerns on an international level, I’m pressed now to speak of the forests. They are dying at a rate that has reached epidemic proportions, and the infections are growing exponentially. Across the state, 80% of pine forests will die from beetle kill, and it is expected that we will loose 40% of aspen. We have yet to discover the direct cause of the aspens’ infection, but it is strongly assumed that the trees are not adapting to the warmer weather.

I sense that dying forests are among the first signs of major climate changes that will swing around to have equally drastic effect on us. For this reason I aspire to reflect these dramatic changes in a way that will cultivate concern for our natural environment and how we are tied to it.

I propose to create a large series of paintings depicting the aspen groves that are dying in the land of my blood. Traditionally, landscape painting is idyllic and romanticized. Beautiful paintings are engaging, but for me it’s also important to tie in conceptual elements that address our impact on the environment.

Recently I took my shotgun to a set of thick plywood panels, skimming the surface along the grain to create violent reliefs. Like any of my brushes, I use my shotgun as a mark making tool. It is a tool that was designed solely for destruction and will speak to the impact of our lifestyle on natural lands.

Contrasting the violent shotgun process, I will paint lush organic depictions of aspen. Following the vertical energy of the shot, I intend to layer groves atop of one another. Primed with white shellac, thin layers of oil paint will maintain a high transparency and appear ghostly. The groves will melt into each other and become an ephemeral flickering of whites and spring greens that will be contrasted by the blood red sap and black gashes of the infected aspen. The overall quality of the images will echo the quaking light in an aspen grove, while being painted in a fleeting manner to reflect the loss of extended families of aspen.

This past spring I spent 2 weeks sleeping in an aspen grove on the ranch where I grew up. I created an initial series depicting healthy aspen groves as a study of light in various weather conditions, as well as the array of spring greens emerging now. I will use these as a reference while creating the actual works from compiling the hundreds of photos I took of the infected groves further afield.

While landscape painting is a variance in my typical genre of painting, I feel this subject addresses environmental concerns that transcend our social structures since climate change will affect everyone, regardless of class. As with any subject, I am driven to find ways for the work to spur on dialogue and action. Frequently I align myself with organizations who work in the fields that have inspired my work. In this way, I am able to broaden arts audiences while encouraging communities to address issues to which we are all tied. Ultimately I envision installing the finished paintings where in one area the viewer is engulfed by intimate groves of ephemeral aspen. I would leave another part of the gallery empty as an ominous forecast for the future lest we begin to consider the repercussions of how we live.

Three generations of Women portrayed in the echoes of War in Bosnia.

Exploring War in a quiet way, my work emphasizes the long term impacts and the lingering effects on survivors. This body of work will explore the echoing effects of War on three generations of women of Croatian heritage from the Vares area near Sarajevo. The series will comprise of portraits of the family as well as paintings of their domestic spaces and natural environments.

Born and raised in Sarajevo, Daughter moved with her family to Vares to escape the siege. Her intuition told her early on that something was terribly wrong. She still struggles with the fact that neighbor turned against neighbor and her best friends from childhood suddenly were supposed to be her enemies. Not buying into the propaganda being fed to her by various sources, she escaped with her older sister three months before the rest of the family was forced to leave. They gained asylum in Sweden, and then she was granted refugee status in the United States. Knowing intimately the effects of war, she has been working with people who are escaping conflict all over the world and seeking asylum in the US.

In 1993, extremists from Croatia led a horrible massacre against the Muslims of Stupri Do that Anthony Loyd describes as “humanity banished to a barren wilderness of darkness and howling” The killings resulted in a huge retaliation directed towards Vares, which at that point was the largest integrated community in Central Bosnia. Overnight it turned into a ghost town as 20,000 Croatians departed in a huge exodus.

A few months after Daughters’ departure, Mother escaped with her youngest daughter and her sister’s family in this exodus; they all ended up in Zagreb, Croatia. She continues medical work she had been practicing in Vares during the war. Her sanctuary is a small porch where she has cultivated three generations of cacti.

Today, Vares is dominated by an abandoned iron mill where Father had worked as a mining engineer prior to his death. The structure was shelled and looted and now stands as a monument to the destructive nature of war.

Grandfather and Grandmother chose not to leave their ranch above Vares as it has been in the family for hundreds of years. They were able to survive by opening their doors to anyone who needed shelter, food or a strategic vantage point. No questions asked. Their barns were emptied by looters, but the structures are still standing. Their land remains in the family, perched up on the picturesque mountainous landscape of ancient forests and rolling fields full of grasses and wildflowers.

Grandmother is very old now, her unkempt garden drastically reduced in size, but still nourishing. Surviving three wars has let her appreciate peace even as she is filled with sorrow that displacement has scattered her family. Although she lost her parents and some siblings to the two World Wars, the hardest loss for her was to loose her son in the Bosnian war just ten days before the Dayton peace agreement. He stepped on a landmine while trying to save a wounded comrade.

All of the places described above as well as portraits that reflect the range of emotions in the three generations of women will be manifested in a large series of intimate sized paintings of different proportions. They will reflect displacement, sorrow and destruction as well as determination and strength.