Making With: Art & Ecology
Bluebonnet Library
Baton Rouge
Through May 31
Baton Rouge is a city built on the Mississippi River, and the relationship between the two is … complicated. Baton Rouge needs the river: for commerce, for energy, to control flooding in the region. But the river didn’t need us, wouldn’t need us except to save it from ourselves.
In a small art installation in the Bluebonnet library, students of an art and ecology art history course reflect on nature through art. The pieces, simple yet striking, are all made in collaboration with nature.
The sound of the river trickling mixes in the small room with the ambient sound of the projector in the otherwise quiet library. The visuals projected against the wall are of the river in between two mirrored halves of a person’s face. Next to it, panels of grass/plant imprints on skin and even photos of sunburns are tessellated into a pattern. It’s visceral and kind of an unsettling viewing experience. Because what you’re looking at is not immediately clear.
It almost feels like you're seeing something you're not supposed to. In some ways you are, in that you're looking deeply at something you've probably never observed closely on someone else's skin: flower, grass imprints and even sunburns on patches of zoomed-in flesh.
The piece, “My Skin is an Archive” by Bailey Rigby, is the result of hours of experimentation, lying on plants, waiting for it to leave an imprint. She writes in an artist statement on the wall that doing nature connection exercises made her think about the literal connection with Louisiana which, as a transplant, she had no ties to until moving here.
Baton Rouge houses a lot of transplants. People love to complain about the city, but LSU students and young professionals are constantly moving here for school and work. When they do so, it’s not just the city or campus they’re getting. Baton Rouge is a total package with culture and food and unpredictable weather and an ever evolving river. It’s worth taking a deeper look at what it means to live here.
“Making with” grew out of a group of students doing just that. It challenges the rest of us to do the same. On the other side of the small room, there’s an installation made of what looks to be different sand/dirt squeezed between human hands and arranged in a circle. It’s simple, yet it showcases a diversity that many people probably don’t know we have. Maybe it’ll encourage some people to dig deeper.
