REWILDING: the artwork of lauren strohacker
REWILDING: the artwork of lauren strohacker
Lauren Strohacker's first artist catalog featuring her new genre public art practice from 2011 to 2017. Text includes a non-traditional artist essay by Jake Friedman and Where the Wild Things Want to Be, an afterword by Ursula K. Heise.
Excerpt from Friedman's Essay
"For let it never be forgotten that nature is a state of war. That evolution is a way of producing weapons. That consciousness is an alibi for survival. That consciousness is a vessel for the transmission of genetics. The individual is an appearance. The individual is a projection. The individual is a trick. Human beings are the most effective weapons ever produced. Evolution removes species as much as it creates them. Sealed in each act of sex is the promise of death."
Excerpt from Where the Wild Things Want to Be
"If the richest and most appealing nature lies in the past, how should we envision our environmental present and future? A new generation of writers, film-makers, and artists has energetically taken on this question with grippingly innovative images and narratives. Lauren Strohacker forms part of this avantgarde of environmental artists who break new ground in our visions of nature. Her videos and installations highlight the vibrant presence of wildlife in our everyday surroundings, even and especially the animals we don't usually notice or rarely encounter face-to-face. Whether it's the Mexican wolves in No(w)here, the jaguar in Un-Fragmenting/Des-Fragmentando, or the frogs, lizards and vultures in Animal Land, Strohacker's art invites us to reflect on the nonhumans that co-inhabit even the most humanly constructed places—such as cities, national borders, or university campuses—with us."
Contributor Biographies
Jake Friedman is a writer, organizer, and arts and culture administrator. He is the founding editor and director of Four Chambers Press, a small press based in Phoenix, AZ whose mission is to give greater visibility to the literary arts, encourage their larger participation in the cultural scene, and help develop a more active community of writers and readers. He serves as a Coordinator at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University.
Ursula K. Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies at the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Western Europe and Japan; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), Nach der Natur:Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, Suhrkamp, 2010) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is also a co-founder of UCLA’s Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS), which launched in October 2016.
The publication of this catalog was facilitated through the fiscal sponsorship of the Phoenix Institute of Contemporary Art (phICA), a not-for-profit organization which compliments other regional cultural institutions while differentiating itself through collaboration and community partnerships and by offering new portals of entry for enjoying,understanding, and interpreting contemporary art. http://phica.org