This interactive installation, made with support from the Seattle-based ARTifACTs collective, addresses the uncertainties faced by humanity as climate change and ongoing ecocide and environmental injustice affect many populations around the world.  

It explores ways to negotiate the barrage of daily assaults on our psyches by imagining the lives of our descendants and what we might do to improve their lives. Visitors are offered an opportunity to transform painful emotions into fuel for creative activism. They are asked to imagine themselves as ancestors as they walk through a series of curtains to a “portal of possibilities”, and encouraged to create an ‘artifact’ containing a commitment to an action that might help our descendants or future generations not only exist, but thrive. A goal of the installation is to foster more dialogue about ways to move past “dystopic” thinking and support resilient activism, no matter how discouraging things may seem. 

EVENTS with Beverly Naidus

30 August, 6 – 8.30pm: Launch event and artist talk – What makes a socially engaged art practice resilient in this time? 

6 September, 6 – 7pm: We Almost Didn’t Make It: D/deaf Exhibition Tour & Making Session 

Both events with be BSL Interpreted.

About Beverly Naidus

Beverly Naidus, interdisciplinary artist, writer and facilitator of an innovative studio arts curriculum, has been creating interactive installations, digital projects, artist books and narrative drawings for over three decades. Much of her work is audience-participatory, inviting people to tell their own stories in response to the theme being explored. Inspired by lived experience, topics in her art focus on environmental and social issues, including how we are individually and collectively affected by racism, climate change and multiple forms of systemic oppression. Her unique courses at UWT emerge from her own projects and include: Art in a Time of War, Cultural Identity and Art, Body Image and Art, Eco-art, Labor, Globalization and Art and the Artist as Visionary and Dreamer. She facilitated and designed the permaculture-inspired, eco-art project, Eden Reframed, on Vashon Island, WA, funded by the Royalty Research Foundation. Her work has been exhibited internationally, in mainstream museums, university galleries, alternative spaces and city streets. It has been reviewed and discussed by many significant writers, including Lucy R. Lippard, Suzi Gablik, Paul Von Blum and Lisa Bloom. She is the author of Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame, numerous essays on socially engaged art and pedagogy and some recent pieces of speculative fiction. She has taught at several NYC museums, Carleton College, Cal State Long Beach, Hampshire College, Goddard College and the Institute for Social Ecology. She has guest lectured and led workshops all over North America and in Europe.

http://www.beverlynaidus.net/

www.edenreframed.blogspot.com