Kim Abeles Turns The Climate Crisis into Eco-art


CULVER CITY — When Kim Abeles In the mid-1980s he had a studio in downtown Los Angeles, excited one day to see a dark bluish wedge appear between the two buildings: a sliver of the San Gabriel Mountains that had been obscured for months by the city’s famous thick fog.

Abeles, a conceptual artist with roots in nature—who once lived in a grain silo in Ohio—turned his amazement into a rule-driven project of his own making. He began photographing that area from the studio fire escape every day until the mountain was clearly visible again. It took a full year and three weeks.

He soon found other ways to approach the wedge. On September 10, 1987, he decided to walk from his studio towards the mountain “with the bird in flight”, until he really saw it, he said. He had to climb barbed wire fences and cross highways for a 10-hour, 16.5-mile pilgrimage.

Also that year, he experimented with a medium that fueled some of his most important work in the past three decades. He cut an image of the mountain wedge into a vinyl sheet covering a plexiglass sheet and placed it on the fire escape for a month to collect particulate matter. In fact, the smoke “drawn” the image, creating both a record of pollution (he called himself the “stenographer of the silhouette”) and something meaningful, even beautiful, out of it.

“How do you represent something like fog that always seems to be in someone else’s neighborhood – how do you show something so hard and hard to put your finger on?” Abeles, 69, said from a clearing near the top of the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook in Culver City. He sat on a bench next to a 10,000-pound manzanita seed statue from his series, with a magnificent view of Los Angeles stretching out in front of him. “Citizen Seeds.” made for the series local track system It includes the handiwork of community members and through the Los Angeles County arts commission. It was an unnaturally hot day in November, marking a streak of light pollution in the distance.

“This is the same problem as the climate crisis in a broader sense,” he said. “Before we can begin to see our collective or individual roles in problem solving, we need to define the problem.”

Attempts to embody the invisible, the visible or the abstract, can now be seen in “Kim Abeles: Smog Collectors, 1987-2020.” California State University, Fullerton, the most complete rendering of the smog franchise to date. art historian Karen MossNoting that Abeles has also done important work on AIDS/HIV and domestic violence, he said he had been immersed in environmental issues for over 30 years – “before other artists started doing what we now call eco-art. ”

The Fullerton fashion show includes little-known smog drawings on paper, fabric, wood, glass and recycled plexiglass, beginning with the original mountain wedge, and his most famous series, commemorative plates of American presidents, displaying each portrait in 1992. weather for four to 40 days – a method of rating each president’s environmental record.

Particularly striking is the contrast between Jimmy Carter, whose face looks pale (out for 8 days) on the porcelain plate, and Ronald Reagan, whose face is dark and smeared with particulate matter (40 days). As he put it, “Carter installed solar panels in the White House and Reagan took them down.”

Abeles is best known for her public art and community workshops rather than playing to the international crowd, but she was featured in a 2019 show on environmental disaster policies at the Garage Museum in Moscow. This time he set out to create a new set of commemorative plaques featuring global leaders from Emmanuel Macron to Vladimir Putin. But a Russian maintenance worker, frightened by Putin’s dirty plate, erased all environmental wrongs.

Abeles did it again It appears alongside other commemorative plates for the Moscow show and now in the California poll.

The Fullerton exhibit also includes two artifacts from the pandemic era: “Smog Catcher,” a larger-than-life self-portrait made from particles in 2020, and images of chaise lounges titled “Loungers on the Titanic” on small wooden panels. It was made that year, while both Covid and the Bobcat Fire were raging. His Titanic work is clearly marked, but his sense of humor and attention to materials—he used European beech, the same wood as the actual chairs on the ship—save it from being overly preachy.

Sharing dismal information about climate change without being didactic has become a specialty for the artist, who now lives in Pasadena, closer to the San Gabriel Mountains. “I love mapping and collecting data, but I don’t think that’s the main purpose of my work – I think work is a direction,” she says, explaining how art can bring people to thought or action.

For example, its oversized seeds are designed in different ways to bind people to the ground beneath their feet. “Do you need art on the trail to bring people here? No,” he said, “but next time I want you to walk further or see more.”



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