WHAT IS MISSING?
Imagine a memorial not as a fixed static monument, but as a work that could exist in several mediums and in multiple places simultaneously.
What is Missing?, my fifth and last memorial, focuses attention on species and places that have gone extinct or will most likely disappear within our lifetime if we do not act to protect them. The project exists formally as both permanent sculptures and as temporary media exhibits; but it also exists virtually— as a website, whatismissing.net, which acts as a nexus for the entire project.
I have known for almost twenty years that I would end the Memorial series with a memorial focused on the environment. Ever since I was a child, the ability of one species, mankind to alter so drastically life on the entire planet has weighed heavily on my thoughts. I cannot think of a greater threat to us and to every other species on this planet than the current crisis we are facing today concerning species and habitat loss and the threat of human-induced climate change.
My interest in memorials has been focused on some of the formative historical events of our time: the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Native American Rights, and the Environment. These are the events that helped shape our generation.
I have been drawn to these five events in the belief that if we can accurately remember these historic events we can better learn from our past in order to help shape a different future. And to that end these memorials have never been strictly about loss, but I have seen them more as teaching tools. They all share a sense of quiet human scale. I like to think of these works as putting a book out in public, or asking people to gather together around a table, or take a walk. They all present a factual accounting of history, which engages people in a direct and personal level, and which asks each person to come to their own conclusions about these events.
What is Missing? is about nature and our relationship to it, in hopes of presenting new ways to see a different outcome for us and for our planet.
My approach to each one of these memorials has followed a similar pattern: initial research that can take from three to five years to the beginnings of an idea and finally to a shape and a work that quietly presents a simple factual accounting of each time. I have always maintained a quiet remove and have left the conclusions up to each and every viewer, except for What Is Missing? which is both a memorial (making one aware of all that we are losing) and yet focused on advocacy (sharing what we can do to help).
I am in the eighth year of focused research and I am revealing this project iteratively. I am building this memorial in full sight and revising it as I go. Perhaps it is not the safest way to make a work, and certainly one that has been and will continue to be experimental in nature, since I am leaving the entire process of its creation in full view through the successive iterations of the website, installations, and lectures about the project. It’s completely voluntary for me and self-initiated; I established a private foundation to fund it and though I see it as the last of the memorials I will be working on this project from now on out.
What is Missing? presents an ecological history of the planet: past, present, and future. The past: the Map of Memory, highlights both historically researched factual accounts of the earth’s former abundance as well as invites anyone to add his or her own memory to the memorial online. The present: Conservation in Action, shares what is being done in the field of conservation, linking to over forty environmental groups and highlighting what they are doing as well as looking at the greatest conservation success and environmental disasters that have occurred. Currently I am working on the final part: Greenprint. which will envision future scenarios that show how we could forge a different path. As an artist I can present new ways of approaching the project and envisioning solutions.
The website takes me to the final dematerialization of the form of a monument. From my first Memorial, which I have never seen as an object but rather a pure surface with the names becoming the object, a mirror that gave us darkly a separation between our world, and now the surface of a screen that each person explores privately yet one shares and explores and contributes a memory that you become a part of this growing online collective memorial. And whose goal is to not just make us aware of these losses but to give us direction and hope for what can be done to help.