Jessica Houston & Bruno Tremblay

Artist Jessica Houston and climate scientist Bruno Tremblay made this video of a fumarole—a spectacular display of underground energy unleashed—at the geothermal energy plant in Hverir, Iceland. It was featured on the British Embassy website’s campaign 100 voices for 100 days before the Copenhagen talks in Fall 2009. This initiative run by the British Embassy in the US highlights the voices of 100 people who feel that action must be taken to tackle climate change.

Here’s the link to the video Solarhringur.

Artist Jessica Houston and climate scientist Bruno Tremblay made this video of a fumarole—a spectacular display of underground energy unleashed—at the geothermal energy plant in Hverir, Iceland. It was featured on the British Embassy website’s campaign 100 voices for 100 days before the Copenhagen talks in Fall 2009. This British Embassy initiative highlights the voices of 100 people who feel that action must be taken to tackle climate change.

I’m drawn to the fleeting experience that allows for revelation through simple means, a moment enlivened by an awareness of impermanence. At the root of my practice is an ongoing investigation of the inextricable relationship between people, place, and time. Examining the meaning of ‘environment’ and the significance of place, I have collaborated with oceanographers, educators, poets and artists. I confront environmental issues by instigating observations and creating a space for contemplation of our changing world. Whether I’m recording people breathing, making installations from found objects, intervening in public spaces, or interacting with scientists, I am driven by subtle shifts in perception and a rearrangement of form.

I often involve the viewer directly, sometimes in disarming ways, to encourage poetic shifts in perspective. I push the boundaries that separate “strangers” from one another through projects that provoke random exchanges in public spaces. Since 2005, across the globe, I have been asking people to both breathe in and out and then hold their breath in front of my video camera, bringing attention to the fact that we are simultaneously living and dying all the time. The work Breathing Portraits is a result of these exchanges across time and place. In Iceland, I worked with oceanographer Dr.Tremblay to create Solarhringur, a video document of a seascape seen from a fjord. We recorded people’s descriptions of the light and the dark during the same time. Their voices provide the sound for the 24-hour time-lapse video which records people’s perception of their changing natural world.

My strategy involves interventions that engage people on a personal level to incite perception of the present time and place, both in terms of natural and cultural phenomenon. Awakening perception of our surroundings encourages meditation upon a sustainable relationship with the natural world. The ongoing nature of many of my projects reflects the continuity of time; the eternal cycles of the natural world; and human being’s relation to and perception of the place they inhabit.

 -Jessica Houston

Jessica Houston received her MA from Columbia University. She has received scholarships from Columbia University and the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. She has participated in residencies in Italy with the artist-collaborative Rosenclaire and William Kentridge. In 2009, she was awarded residencies at NES in Skagaströnd, Iceland and at the CAMAC Centre d’Art in France. She was an artist aboard a Cape Farewell voyage to the Arctic; she appears in the expedition documentary by Big Heart Media, London, UK. She has had many solo and group exhibitions both in the United States and abroad and her work is in private collections around the world. Her recent solo exhibition “Weather Pages” at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, was an interactive installation where scientists participated in the ongoing creation of the work during the duration of the exhibition. She was recently invited to the first Tipping Point conference held in the United States—a forum to bring artists and scientists together to discuss climate change issues. She currently teaches at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Calhoun School in New York City. Jessica shows her work at the Sragow Gallery and the Cheryl McGinnis Gallery in New York and at the Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, New York.

Artist’s site: http://www.jessicahouston.net/

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