EARTHTIME:  Tectonic Shifts throughout the Phanerozoic Eon

Curated by Heather Christensen Smith 

Corporate Headquarters of NRG Energy, a 100% sustainable energy company in Princeton, NJ 

January 15- June 13th,  2019  

I was invited by curator, Heather Christensen Smith, to exhibit and create work for NRG, a 100% sustainable energy company.  My work speaks to our shared values of energy conservation and sustainability.  This show was created primarily for those working at NRG who are exploring new technologies in real time and as an urgent endeavor.  

We all relate to maps viscerally.  We Immediately want to find ourselves in them; where we live, where we have migrated from or where we hope to move or travel.  What we seem to never truly consider is how land masses are in a constant state of flux. Though earth time is exeedingly slower than human time, the earth continues to move and take shape, and we humans are speeding up the clock. 

For my installation of paintings at NRG, I chart the earth through the last 500 million years. I compare the tectonic shift of the continents from the Paleozoic Era to the present and into the future.  Looping the earth's past into the earth's future shows how rising sea levels will reshape continents in a fraction of the time it took plate tectonics to craft them into their current state. This series of 17 oil paintings juxtapose the slow evolution of land and sea over millions of years to the critically predicted fast moving changing shorelines that will have potentially catastrophic implications. Sea level rise and climate change are predicted to alter urban and natural environments irrevocably into the future. In my recent project RISE: All Boats, I address how mass human migration will challenge geo-political boundaries on a global scale unimagined by earlier generations. In the largest painting of the EARTHTIME series, FLAT EARTH, I present a current map, inspired by google earth images that show topographies unrestricted by man-made borders and boundaries.  These paintings offer a hopeful note, a twofold scenario, that with urgent and innovative technologies which reduce carbon emissions and mitigate global warming, we humans can still fight to save a changing planet. 

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