Lauren Strohacker is a site-responsive conceptual artist who emphasizes the non-human in an increasingly human-centric world. Grounded in community, her practice layers public and private space with representations of wild animals to counter Shifting Baseline Syndrome—the communal process of forgetting historical ecosystems and normalizing their ongoing loss.
Strohacker's practice is co-creative and cross-disciplinary. In dialogue with wildlife biologists, conservation groups, and civic partners, Strohacker situates wildlife within complex ecological, political, and cultural realities. These conceptual rewilding projects focus on creatures who have been controlled, displaced, eradicated, and, eventually, forgotten by anthropocentric societies. Spanning street art, digital projection, sound installation, sculpture, and new media, these interventions transform shared spaces into sites of multi-species encounter, reflecting larger contexts of human-animal conflict and radical interspecies municipalism.
“No longer the wild, “untrammeled” nature beloved by North American environmentalists, nature in the Anthropocene is always inflected by human actions, even when we don’t intend it. Even remote places where no human has ever set foot and deep layers of the world’s oceans are being transformed by climate change and ocean acidification, for example, whether we are individually aware of it or not. Strohacker’s works, with their sophisticated mix of attention to the real world of nature and attention to its many mediations and representations, are a brilliant gateway to these discussions about the futures of nature and humans as well as nonhumans’ places in those futures.”
Gallery Representation: Visions West Contemporary