Crossroads merges art and science
Science and art converged Thursday as a sustainability-based project hit its peak.
The Crossroads Project began as the idea of Robert Davies, a physics professor at USU. He created the project to better educate the public on the issue on climate change and to encourage them to create change in their communities. Last week the Fry String Quartet performed an original composition for the project followed by a gallery opening. The exhibition will be open until Oct. 10 in the Tippets Exhibit Hall in the Chase Fine Arts Center.
“The title basically means that we are at a point in our history that we have a decision to make,” said Jeff Courts, the director of production services for the Caine College of the Arts. “We can either continue as we have been and suffer all the consequences, or we are going to choose the other path, the newer path, the better path and actually turn this thing around. That’s the crossroads. It’s a decision point.”
The project incorporates scientific evidence and facts regarding climate change with paintings,
photography, sculpture and music.
After Davies thought of the idea for the Crossroads Project he shared it with the Fry String Quartet – local musicians who shared his same concerns. From there, the idea spread to the composer, Laura Kaminsky, who knew a painter. It all seemed to fall into place, Courts said.
“Artists are people who are sensitive to the world around them and this is topic they felt strongly about,” Courts said. “Everyone came on board with such an incredible enthusiasm. It was lucky: It was a fortunate project because we talked to the right people at the right time. Every person brought great enthusiastic passion.”
Kaminsky said she shares Davies’ concern about the sustainable issues facing the earth. As a composer, she said the language she uses to express her feelings is through music.
“Where Dr. Davis spoke from the scientific realm and provided the audience with facts that could contextualize the issue, what I was hoping to do with the music I composed was to evoke on an emotional level,” Kaminsky said. “I wanted to make people imagine they were in beautiful flowing water that could conceivably disappear or in the middle of the forest with animals running around struggling to find their food. My job as a composer is to create a narrative using sound that has some sort of meaning.”
Each artist was chosen for their different styles of interpretation on the subject matter. Painter Rebecca Allan said she has been conscious of the changes in the landscape that she has witnessed in her life while growing up near the Great Lakes and living in the Pacific Northwest.
“Once when I started reading about the science of climate change and thinking and seeing how the impacted the landscape of the mountains where I lived, it couldn’t be ignored,” she said.
Much of Allan’s strong connection to nature is one of her main inspirations for her work.
“I want my work to move people to think about their own responses to the landscape,” she said. “When I make a painting, I’m trying to suggest what all of us sense what is underneath the visible world, the energies that drive the visible world. I hope there will be a sense of discovery and a sense of wonder and a memory – the memory that nature really is an important thing in our lives and to make sure we don’t lose it.”
Allan said she hopes visitors to the gallery and those who saw the performance Thursday evening will think about what they can do to help reverse climate change.
“It’s too much for one person to think that he or she is going to solve the problem of climate change,” she said. “But I hope everyone can think of a small act or gesture that can become part of their lives.”
Garth Lenz’s photographs are on display at the exhibit as well. Called “The True Cost of
Oil,” the group of photographs show aerial views of Canada’s tar sands and the last great forest located in Alberta. The photographs show comparative images of the oil sands and the impacted surrounding ecosystem.
“I want people to realize the actuality of climate change,” he said. “I want people to realize what is really at stake – let them see it visually, give people an opportunity to look at it themselves and come up with their own conclusions. If we can see what is actually going on, we can learn a lot.”
Lenz said he is partially motivated to show the effects of climate change by the fact that he has small children.
“I have a 10 year old and a 6 year old,” he said, “I really do fear what kind of life they are going to have – what this planet is going to be like when they are adults like me. It’s very frightening. We need to get our act together and act upon what we know. It’s getting harder and harder to ignore.”
Christine Rohal, a USU graduate student studying ecology, attended the project to see how the creators and artists were going to transform the science behind climate change into an artistic experience.
“I already felt strongly about the issues,” she said. “I felt very moved by it. They were really successful. I think that it got me thinking what more I can do personally.”
The purpose of the Crossroads Project was to get people thinking what more they could do for the environment and to alert them that the human race is at a decision point, said Courts.
“The Crossroad itself, that fork in the road used to be so far enough down the road – at least in people’s minds, that they didn’t think they needed to consider themselves part of that choice,” he said. “The whole message of crossroads is that it’s here – the choice is here.”
– 1331dani@gmail.com