This work centers on my family’s experience with flooding, mold infestation, and the subsequent physical and mental health issues that were caused by climate change.

Home should bring thoughts of safety, security, and sanctuary, but this is not the case for a majority of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people that deal not only with environmental toxins from local plants and industry, but also the subtle effects of climate change.

These found object and collage works form from abstracted memory and present health issues I deal with from that experience. I hope to convey the deep feelings of loss, growth, healing, and understanding of how our actions to our local and ultimately world environment only come back and affect us. - N. Masani Landfair

Landfair explores the mental and physical tolls of living in a chronically flooded home on Chicago's South Side. Climate change’s more intense storms and floods hit low-income communities and communities of color hardest. The work consists of three found-object collages on found, water-damaged wooden boards. Imagery of mold surrounds them. Regular markings on the background between the boards and beyond suggest the rhythm of breathing. The first panel uses photos of the artist's flooded basement, cut up and reassembled into a convoluted form that references the unseen growth of black mold in the walls of the artist’s home. The middle panel relates the artist’s efforts to reorganize her life and heal after prolonged mold exposure. The red line references lifeline, blood, living, breathing. Medical tape and the backs of torn-up, water-damaged posters create the white, clinical effect. Images of mold and actual mold spores (sealed in gel) reflect the insidious threat. On the final panel, a photo of the artist’s underwater basement floor reflecting a sunlit basement window is a meditation on acceptance.

Hall’s multimedia installation explores economies and ecologies of water as a subject of tension. As temperatures rise the atmosphere can physically hold more water, which is made visible through extreme weather events, flooding, and drought throughout the planet. 

In a dark room  the viewer is enveloped in the folk song “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin Bad.” Projected on one wall is a spoon pouring water onto a larger-than-life penny that slowly reaches capacity. The video suggests value systems based in economies of extraction have driven the road we are on to a bad place, a catastrophic tipping point. Accompanying the video is an installation of 108 ceramic casts of water retaining plants and seeds, which ask- how might we plant seeds for a living, lively, and more resilient future? Like ghosts of the present, the plants suggest the future of our planet lies in systems of value beyond monetary systems and towards those that value care and an understanding of the inter-being of all organisms on this planet.

“There’s no denying that the stormwater-management infrastructure built in the 1920s, 1950s, and 1970s has been overtaken by the swiftness and violence of climate change, and that the current infrastructure has not solved all the flooding problems that Chicago and Cook County face.” - Debora Shore, Former Commissioner, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, June 2020. The Chicago region’s changing climate has brought more frequent intense downpours, causing more flooded streets and basements, more property damage, more loss.

Through imagery of headlines, scientific data, and fantastical scenes, Leich’s watercolors and animation assembles a story of increasing water, documenting damage already unfolding. It also imagines a range of possibilities, including a return to Chicago’s absorptive native prairies for a more porous city.

Parts-per-million (planetary aspirations) is about the air we breathe every moment.  We exhale carbon dioxide naturally from our bodies, but also pump it out by the gigaton from our cars, factories, and power plants the world over. Through the physiological aspirations of our breathing we connect directly to the planet’s carbon cycle; at the same time, through the economic aspirations of our fossil-fueled culture, we radically alter the composition of the air, those gigatons of carbon dioxide contributing to a global warming that radically threatens the stability of the climate we all rely upon. – Andrew S. Yang

In the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, we have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere from 280 parts per one million air molecules to 415 parts per million. This deceptively small change is radically altering our planet’s climate – impacting our health and safety, and endangering myriad species the world over. Parts-per-million (planetary aspirations) uses one million dots to visualize this invisible threat. An aspiration is defined as both a hope and a breath. This work balances the causes and effects of rising carbon dioxide through the use of the word’s double meaning – human aspirations driven by fossil-fueled industrialization and the breath of all of Earth’s organisms.