Viewing Nature

Linda L Chappel ‘Viewing Nature’ print series

  These poems and visual images are reflections on the ways human cultures understand their relationships to land and animals.  I am informed primarily by my background in art history and a life-long interest in environmentalism. My research extends into the ways cultures historically interacted with their biome and how in the current age we as a species impact the global environment.

  This series of prints contemplates human cultures across time, from the earliest eras to the present. Each set consists of ten prints with unique combinations of imagery layered with the text.  The use of letterpress allows for a repetition of the text while leaving room to vary the layers of images. This process of doing multiples provided a meditative approach. At times working on these series was relative to a story or song that is repeated but varied with each repetition.  This process allowed me to try a combination of direct painting, stenciling, images transfer and monotype as I worked on each series; providing further ways to consider the meaning of the text, images and interactions between them.

Gabe Farley Slightly Familiar Memories is a sculptural television that is fabricated by hand out of White Pine and Douglas Fir boards and modeled after a CRT TV from the 1990s. Rather than displaying external media on a screen, the TV presents a softer environment of brambles and paper foliage, which the viewer can engage with using the wooden buttons on its front to turn it on, change the channel, and adjust the volume.

This environment is composed of four plants: cypress hedges, pyracantha bushes, vinca vine, and English ivy. These species are recognizable and common in many places, yet they do not fully belong here. As decorative plants, they have little connection to the New Mexican landscape of high desert yuccas and agaves or the surrounding forests of ponderosa, oak, and juniper. Drawing from childhood experiences of being both indoors and outdoors, particularly in domestic spaces like backyards, the work reflects environments that feel natural but are actually carefully constructed, shaped by familiarity and appearance rather than ecological belonging.

The TV experience feels like a dream in which nothing is quite real or as it should be, and may not be exactly how you remember it. Even so, there is still a sense of connection, something real within an experience that remains only slightly familiar.

-Gabe Farley   To see full C.V. additional projects or to contact visit gabefarley.com

1-800-SCOBY examines our desire to communicate with non-human lifeforms and questions the answers we seek by talking with these organisms. SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) is created from and facilitates the fermentation of kombucha. Using this living culture, this installation critiques the anthropomorphism of more-than-human life. 

Presented as a self-help line, 1-800-SCOBY prompts visitors to “call in” to the symbiotic system and record their encounter in the logbook. However, the experience is entirely pre-constructed. The attached sensors are not transmitting anything to the audio heard from the phone, instead using soundbytes recorded directly from the culture. Through this illusion, we explore whether humans can communicate outside their own anthropocentric frameworks, interrogating whether interspecies translation is a fantasy or if genuine exchange could be possible.

What do we hope to learn, solve, or uncover, and how may we implement the knowledge of our interspecies partners? 1-800-SCOBY invites participants to investigate whether these are authentic bids for connection or a projection of human-ness onto the non-human world. As the SCOBY logbook reveals: we need more data.

-Gabe Farley   -Claire Fall Blanchette 

To see full C.V.’s additional projects or to contact visit gabefarley.com

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