Medium Format: Soil Photography, Ecological Mosaics, Dispossession by William Schaefer

Please join us for a talk titled, "Medium Format: Soil Photography, Ecological Mosaics, Dispossession" by Professor William Schaefer (Durham University, UK). 

The artist Wang Youshen’s installation Mei pingmi (Per square meter) (2014) juxtaposes mosaics of drywall fragments from Wang’s repeatedly demolished studios; landscape photographs whose surfaces Wang has washed away; and composites of photographs, drywall, soil, and seeds. Per Square Meter engages with what ecologists call landscape mosaics—a concept echoing artist Paul Klee’s ecological understanding of point, line, plane in drawing. Both Per Square Meter and the field of landscape ecology begin in brokenness—the fragmentation of land and ecosystems, and dislocations of people, animals, plants, and matter—and turn to mosaics to picture processes of form and flow, destruction and composition.   Drawing together Wang’s installations, photographer Muge’s landscapes of dispossession along the Yangzi River in Hui jia (Going home) (2013), and Klee’s grounds, I explore how the ecological reconstitutes relationships between the figurative and abstraction; and how in our ecological crisis the ground becomes figure even as human figures are left to piece together the grounds they have lost.