on nature and imagination

For years I made art work about how the culture negotiates its relationship with the natural world. In 1998 I started looking into biotechnology, specifically the commercial applications of genetic engineering well under way in American agriculture. The more I investigated the more aghast I was at the opacity and complexity of the system that produces and distributes our food, and the overwhelming control of it by increasingly few corporations.

Up until that time "nature" in my imagination did not include food, an ellision I find typical of nature in the American collective imaginary, which is more or less based on a concept of wilderness. Only by accomplishing this separation in our imaginative and aesthetic lives is it possible to accomplish tolerance of a system that pours toxins into the land and water that produces the food we put into our bodies, our most intimate bodily connection with nature.

Since that time I have focused on locating the negotiated definition of "natural" --and the desires we associate with it-- in our daily lives and tried to problematize it there. As long as we believe this boundary is somewhere outside the place and time of here and now, we are poorly served by our imaginations. If we really want to live in a world with maximum natural and cultural diversity, better to see the map of our existence in all its extensions and to imagine how we might want to reroute it.