Barry Dumka Essay 2015
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond
In an era of radical environmental changes and challenges, artists can play a pivotal role to alert our senses and engage critical thinking about the state - and fate - of the planet at this perilous time. The expressive language of art can often prove more persuasive than factual statistics or media alarm. Artists such as Maya Lin, Joseph Beuys and Ed Burtynsky - among a varied collection of next generation standouts - are changing the terms for what constitutes a landscape artist while inflecting their scenes of the contemporary world with an activist’s agenda.
For Canadian environmental artist David Ellingsen - whose intimate connection with the natural world is rooted in his rural upbringing on a small remote island in the Pacific Northwest - there is a moral imperative as much as a conceptual vision that sparks his work. But his photographs - though cunning and prickly with social concerns - read more as a humanist prayer than political protest. Through the full range of his different photographic series, Ellingsen is documenting what we have, questioning what we are losing and purposefully involving himself in that dialogue between Man and Nature, consumerism and sustainability, life and death.
What we have in this world is biological diversity and ecological beauty - but we are at a high risk of catastrophically diminishing both. In his Sealife and Skylife series, Ellingsen tenderly documents a range of creatures using the darkly expressive potential of Polaroid Type 55 negatives. Finely-grained and lush with moments of exacting clarity, the collection is heartfelt and evocative but also troubling. With changes occurring in ocean temperatures and currents and with ongoing degradation of natural habitats, studies have warned that we are entering a sixth wave of mass extinction. Ellingsen's work makes you feel the significance of that loss.
Initiated in 2011, Ellingsen's Weather Patterns turns both a documentary eye and conceptual focus to the ever-changing meteorological impressions he records nearly every day from the same vantage point near his home on Cortes Island. As the weather shifts, softens and blurs out the same minimalist block of sea, land and sky, Ellingsen's series manifests his archival impulse and environmental concerns but also his artistic habit of telling the truth of his inner life by looking outward. The conceptual angle to the work - so many individual days chopped up into grids and groupings to connect these patterns with historical significance - give these constructed pieces a compelling visual dynamic. There are many truths to be told in the changing weather.
But it is in his two most recent series - Future Imperfect and The Last Stand - that Ellingsen makes most resonant his conceptual vision and Romantic aesthetic. And each has a personal edge that gives the images a quiet poignancy that is very affecting - and effective. In The Last Stand, Ellingsen's quietly contemplative scenes of old growth tree stumps are all photographed on his family’s property on Cortes Island - in fact, many were logged by his ancestral family members. Ellingsen cuts a fine line here. The images are intended to question his own culpability in the globalized demand for natural resources that is stripping the earth bare and to present a challenge to viewers about our ecological priorities. But the work feels more elegiac than angry. Shrouded in frail light, these grave markers of natural history appear raw and haunting but also - in their still fecund manner - redemptive. Both our collective guilt and our potential salvation are on view here.
With Future Imperfect, Ellingsen takes viewers on a queerly captivating journey into the contemporary conceptual sublime. These vast, primordial landscapes are beautiful but disturbing given the limp, naked bodies strewn about in the trees, on rock outcroppings, huddled together on a lake bed or emerging like beached sea life from the ocean. At first glance, the work might prompt considerations of death and future dystopias. But look again at the three wisp-like bodies in their ivory skin cradled beneath a protective tree or the nest of naked figures exposed to the elements beside a river. It is more the vulnerability and humility of man in the natural environment - which should still be our natural environment despite all the modern technological efforts to close us off from ecology - that makes these images so mesmerizing. And the fact that all of these figures is Ellingsen himself (working alone, he used a remote shutter to capture these set-up scenes) adds a wondrous personal dimension to the work. Perhaps if we put ourselves more at nature’s mercy we would value more its merit. By stripping himself of human superiority, Ellingsen's photographs become a meditation on how human life needs to recalibrate our relationship with the environment.
When in 1845 the American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau chose to reside in measured simplicity guided by nature in a one-room cabin at Walden Pond, he was moved by the era’s Romantic spirit and wanted to get back to basics and ecological balance. What Thoreau learned through his extended stay - and meaningfully wrote about - helped define the values of that age. For David Ellingsen - living almost two centuries later when Man’s relationship with nature has grown more distant, rocky and ruinous - it’s also important to expressively share what he has learned in his own measured way living in rural isolation for long periods of time. Both alert and alarming, Ellingsen's photographs take the temperature of this troubled time and expressively show the reasons that we should care.
- Barry Dumka, 2015