Series of six blank canvases (70x70cm) signed by the factory workers that made them in Daler Rowney, Free Industrial Zone, La Romana, the Dominican Republic.
Images: Photograph of 3 canvases from the series in the solo exhibition 'Our Celestial Sphere' at Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2019.
Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Limerick Institute of Technology, and Fingal County Council. Images: Pallas Projects/Studios & Kerry Guinan.
(Original caption from artist’s website)
Series of six blank canvases (70x70cm) signed by the factory workers that made them in Daler Rowney, Free Industrial Zone, La Romana, the Do
And after contacting the Irish Museum of Modern Art and being referred to a curator (!), they provided me with the caption information that was used when displaying the work for the Staying With The Trouble exhibition in 2025 (thank you so much IMMA staff!!)
Artists is a series of blank, square canvases, each signed by a staff member in the manufacturing facility that produced the canvases in the La Romana Free Trade Zone, the Dominican Republic. The manufacturer, Daler Rowney, is a popular supplier of art materials in Ireland. The artist coordinated the project remotely by contacting the facility manager. The signatories volunteered to take part in the project upon invitation. They are Johan Rivera, Carlos Roa, Aneury Rondon, and Orlando Saldivar.
Anyways, I’d spent about the last 6 hours of my life trying to find out this information after some discussion on artist supply chains came up on the dashboard. Hope you enjoy the work as much as I do.
forgive me father for i have opened a notification and read the message within to make the red dot go away and then forgot to reply for a month . it will happen again
opposite of a wife guy im a my friends guy. oh you like that flower thats crazy my friend literally gardens. oh you ate a bagel today thats crazy when i hung out with my friend we got bagels. oh you took a walk by some water that's crazy because a year ago me and my friend took this specific walk by the water and it was meaningful. phone screen of my friends. always talking about my friends. starting to think nobody else has my friends in the same way that i have my friends and im really sorry about that you know what i mean
Dear Bunjicus Wunjicus, what is the great American biotic interchange?
okay so, for the vast vast vast VAST majority of their time in existence as continents, North and South America have been completely separate continents, with oceans in between them.
135 mya (million years ago):
60 mya:
once they separated from Laurasia and Gondwana respectively and became their own thing after the Big Kablooie (66mya), they both started to evolve their own completely unique ecosystems with their own forms of life!
North America was a bonanza for big cats, proboscideans, bears, and canines:
<art src: Joe Venus>
while South America went big on giant sloths, terror birds, marsupials, and armadillos that could tow your car:
<art src: Gabriel Ugueto>
and so they remained, two houses alike in dignity, but rarely interacting except for swapping stormtossed refugees once in a while as they very slooooowly drifted towards each other.
and then, 2.7 mya, the two drifting continents uplifted the seafloor between them like a snowdrift in between two oncoming plows and made much of Central America and Panama.
AND EVERYTHING CHANGED WHEN PANAMA ATTACKED
and WHOOOOPS.
suddenly, the biota of both continents had freedom of movement into a totally new environment. terror birds pushed north into Central and Southern North America, only to be pushed back by incoming waves of smilodon, jaguars, and pumas.
<src: Life On Our Planet>
canines and proboscideans and bears and rabbits and predators of all shapes and sizes came roaring south into the body of South America, wreaking environmental change in their wake, while fleets of possums, armadillos, and giant sloths trekked north to find some new niches of their own.
when the dust had settled, South America was VERY different from how it had first looked, with many native predators supplanted by carnivorans and many small to medium herbivores supplanted by northern species. the terror birds were gone, ending the last legacy of the dominant predatory theropods.
<src: Mauricia Anton>
North America had picked up some new additions of its own, some that lasted (armadillos, possums) and some that didn't.
<src: Peter Schouten>
and we call this kerfuffle the Great American Biotic Interchange, because it sounds better than ECOLOGICAL WARZONE: ESCAPE FROM BRAZIL
Important note: the reason South America seems to get the short end of the stick, exchange-wise, is because North America had already been dealing with Asian biota invading for millions of years across Beringia (aka the Bering Straits landbridge). A lot of the big NorAm Charismatic Megafauna (TM) is actually Asian in origin (bison, bears, beavers, etc.).
So the North knew how to deal with invasive species...many of them had started that way! The South, OTOH, had been in its own isolated bubble forever with only the occasional rafted rodent or primate to impinge upon its ecology until BOOM!
The parallels to immune systems and ideologies, etc. write themselves.
Something has changed in the United States, and not just the climate.
No paywall version here.
"Two and a half years ago, when I was asked to help write the most authoritative report on climate change in the United States, I hesitated...
In the end, I said yes, but reluctantly. Frankly, I was sick of admonishing people about how bad things could get. Scientists have raised the alarm over and over again, and still the temperature rises. Extreme events like heat waves, floods and droughts are becoming more severe and frequent, exactly as we predicted they would. We were proved right. It didn’t seem to matter.
Our report, which was released on Tuesday, contains more dire warnings. There are plenty of new reasons for despair. Thanks to recent scientific advances, we can now link climate change to specific extreme weather disasters, and we have a better understanding of how the feedback loops in the climate system can make warming even worse. We can also now more confidently forecast catastrophic outcomes if global emissions continue on their current trajectory.
But to me, the most surprising new finding in the Fifth National Climate Assessment is this: There has been genuine progress, too.
I’m used to mind-boggling numbers, and there are many of them in this report. Human beings have put about 1.6 trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution — more than the weight of every living thing on Earth combined. But as we wrote the report, I learned other, even more mind-boggling numbers. In the last decade, the cost of wind energy has declined by 70 percent and solar has declined 90 percent. Renewables now make up 80 percent of new electricity generation capacity. Our country’s greenhouse gas emissions are falling, even as our G.D.P. and population grow.
In the report, we were tasked with projecting future climate change. We showed what the United States would look like if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius. It wasn’t a pretty picture: more heat waves, more uncomfortably hot nights, more downpours, more droughts. If greenhouse emissions continue to rise, we could reach that point in the next couple of decades. If they fall a little, maybe we can stave it off until the middle of the century. But our findings also offered a glimmer of hope: If emissions fall dramatically, as the report suggested they could, we may never reach 2 degrees Celsius at all.
For the first time in my career, I felt something strange: optimism.
And that simple realization was enough to convince me that releasing yet another climate report was worthwhile.
Something has changed in the United States, and not just the climate. State, local and tribal governments all around the country have begun to take action. Some politicians now actually campaign on climate change, instead of ignoring or lying about it. Congress passed federal climate legislation — something I’d long regarded as impossible — in 2022 as we turned in the first draft.
[Note: She's talking about the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act, which despite the names were the two biggest climate packages passed in US history. And their passage in mid 2022 was a big turning point: that's when, for the first time in decades, a lot of scientists started looking at the numbers - esp the ones that would come from the IRA's funding - and said "Wait, holy shit, we have an actual chance."]
And while the report stresses the urgency of limiting warming to prevent terrible risks, it has a new message, too: We can do this. We now know how to make the dramatic emissions cuts we’d need to limit warming, and it’s very possible to do this in a way that’s sustainable, healthy and fair.
The conversation has moved on, and the role of scientists has changed. We’re not just warning of danger anymore. We’re showing the way to safety.
I was wrong about those previous reports: They did matter, after all. While climate scientists were warning the world of disaster, a small army of scientists, engineers, policymakers and others were getting to work. These first responders have helped move us toward our climate goals. Our warnings did their job.
To limit global warming, we need many more people to get on board... We need to reach those who haven’t yet been moved by our warnings. I’m not talking about the fossil fuel industry here; nor do I particularly care about winning over the small but noisy group of committed climate deniers. But I believe we can reach the many people whose eyes glaze over when they hear yet another dire warning or see another report like the one we just published.
The reason is that now, we have a better story to tell. The evidence is clear: Responding to climate change will not only create a better world for our children and grandchildren, but it will also make the world better for us right now.
Eliminating the sources of greenhouse gas emissions will make our air and water cleaner, our economy stronger and our quality of life better. It could save hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives across the country through air quality benefits alone. Using land more wisely can both limit climate change and protect biodiversity. Climate change most strongly affects communities that get a raw deal in our society: people with low incomes, people of color, children and the elderly. And climate action can be an opportunity to redress legacies of racism, neglect and injustice.
I could still tell you scary stories about a future ravaged by climate change, and they’d be true, at least on the trajectory we’re currently on. But it’s also true that we have a once-in-human-history chance not only to prevent the worst effects but also to make the world better right now. It would be a shame to squander this opportunity. So I don’t just want to talk about the problems anymore. I want to talk about the solutions. Consider this your last warning from me."
-via New York Times. Opinion essay by leading climate scientist Kate Marvel. November 18, 2023.
While it might look like an abstract painting, it's actually the surface pattern off a cedar tree trunk washed up onto the beach. I found it to be a fascinating mix of shading, energy and flow. I can see people, fish, the flow of rivers - the record of a whole life story just waiting to be discovered and retold.
man with excellent self restraint dismayed to realize that not wanting anything is more likely a depression symptom than a carefully honed skill that atones for other aspects of his character
