Elizabeth Demaray, the keynote speaker for the Environment Across Boundaries Symposium, blew me away with her unique and utterly fascinating ideas. She uses art to convey complex ideas about the boundaries between the built and natural world, the humorous and the serious, and the pragmatic and impractical. She described one of my favorite examples of this in our ENVS220 class. For this piece, there was a museum with taxidermies of birds in an artificial habitat with bird sounds playing over it. I have seen this same scene in Cabella’s Outdoor Store many times, and like Demaray, I was put off by the display because it imitates this natural scene in an unnatural environment. It’s not good or bad, but it is definitely off-putting. Demaray beautifully highlighted this uncomfortableness by having humans recreate the bird sounds and playing them instead of the actual bird sounds in the display. This recreates this sense of off-putting while showing how the built environment is so pervasive in a very humorous and subtle manor.
And Demaray is filled with these curious and important ideas. Another idea that I love is how she reupholsters rocks and puts them back into a more ‘natural’ environment for people to find. This is certainly subtly off-putting for people. I’m part of a Washington Hikers and Climbers facebook group, and this reminds me a lot of a picture posted in it of a hike in San Diego with a nice nature scene with a stream and trees, but the rocks were covered in graffiti. And people were very, very upset and passionate about how nature should be “pure” and not contaminated with our art.
A lot of Demaray’s art gets at this same idea and passion that people have for the purity of nature. I would imaging that reupholstered rocks stuck back where they came would have a similar effect on people. The reupholstered rocks are slightly more subtle I think and don’t hold the same negative connotations as graffiti does, but I think wanting to make rocks softer and wanting to use them as canvases for graffiti both are asking the role humans should play in the natural environment. This is a hugely important question to address moving forward through the anthropocene and I am glad that Demaray is willing to cross these boundaries to ask important questions.