VISIBLE CLIMATE
Visible Climate, digital prints, wall vinyl and artists book on display at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, April 10-August 19, 2021
STATEMENT FROM LEE LINES + RACHEL SIMMONS ABOUT THE PROJECT
Visible Climate integrates methodologies from art and science through the ongoing collaboration between Lee Lines (geographer) and Rachel Simmons (artist), colleagues at Rollins College who have created environmentally themed visual art projects since 2010. This project is the product of approximately 200 hours of fieldwork in our national parks and other public lands, researching and documenting climate change impacts, followed by a collaborative process of translating visual evidence into layered images that highlight the impacts of climate change in some of our nation’s most iconic landscapes.
To create the work, Simmons reduced Lines’ original photographs to black and white, transferred them onto paper using a printing press, and then hand-colored and re-digitized each image. This multi-step process creates a selective loss of information and degradation, while the hand-colorization references and challenges romanticized landscapes from postcards produced when the parks were first mass marketed to early 20th century visitors.
In the installation of digital prints which accompany the Visible Climate artists book, Lines and Simmons reference the scientific method of observation, documentation, and data collection. The combination of picturesque prints and hand-written field notes on specific dates and locations of each image compliment the personal narratives from the book, highlighting differences & commonalities between how artists and scientists gain an understanding of the changing landscape. By combining these approaches, Lines and Simmons hope to offer a compelling entry point for viewers into the interdisciplinary dialogue on climate change.
The atmospheric gases driving the processes of climate change are mostly invisible, making it difficult to focus public attention on the unprecedented changes taking place across our planet. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, now at roughly 415 parts per million, last reached this high point over three million years ago, when global sea levels were over 50 feet higher than today.
The resulting changes in climate have triggered a constellation of ecological changes across the North American continent, steadily reshaping cherished landscapes. Rising temperatures and decreasing precipitation are altering glaciers at Mt. Rainier National Park, triggering flooding and debris flows, threatening historic 1920s park buildings, and burying old growth forests in sediment. Rising sea levels along the Atlantic coastline are causing sunny-day tidal flooding events in vulnerable locations, increasing groundwater salinity, and shifting the boundary between salt-tolerant mangroves and freshwater habitats in Everglades National Park. Rising temperatures and extreme drought events are degrading habitats across the American West, changing the fire ecology of pinyon pine-juniper forests at Mesa Verde National Park, reducing flows on the Colorado River, and threatening the continued existence of the Joshua Tree in its eponymous national park.
Most of these changes have unfolded over the course of decades, making it difficult for the casual visitor to fully comprehend, especially in the absence of clear reference points. Art has the potential to highlight these changes, making them visible to all who are willing to see. The stakes could not be higher.
