Into Shadows, Terrors, Years
heat lamps / conches, dish drying rack / jug, fossil / refrigerator door, baby bottle holder, alligator / antenna, sunflower / headrests, coral / clipboard, dirt, letter from Jodey Arrington / video on monitor with sound
2020
installed at Satellite Gallery, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas
Climate change has created an ambient anxiety that permeates contemporary existence. Into Shadows, Terrors, Years is an installation by Adam Farcus, exhibited in both the Satellite Gallery and Studio D, that gives form to and persistence against this ambient anxiety. Climate change is biting at our ankles, without any real action taken by global nations, as is most recently exemplified by the failure of the 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25) to negotiate a deal that would limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Meanwhile, the United States, under Donald Trump’s direction, has withdrawn from the landmark Paris Agreement.
Psychological associations are studying the effects of climate change on humans and are finding that “gradual, long-term changes in climate can also surface a number of different emotions, including fear, anger, feelings of powerlessness, or exhaustion”(1). In short, our society has few ways to fully understand what is happening or what can be done to reverse it.
This exhibition proposes ways to protest and build more complicated emotional relationships with the phenomena that cause climate anxiety. The installation is made with appropriated objects that, in combination, create unsettling and uncanny moments that give a form to this anxiety. And, persistence in the face of climate anxiety is found in the performance, Scream Chorus, which functions as an act of playful and nonsensical release.
1. Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance. American Psychological Association. March 2017.