Woah and Wonder
Written by Ashley Woods Hollister | Photos by Marc AltAn artist’s record of our current state of evolution in the Determining Decade in the age of Anthropocene.
If you’re a conservation biologist right now, it's an incredible time to be at work on this planet. Everyone is finally listening to you. Artists, business, tech, everyone...
Cassandra C. Jones at Taft Gardens with the Australian Grass Trees
Because your job is to fix Nature — and the growing consensus is that this is the greatest task for our present generation.
And yet, your dreams are troubled. You have a recurring one in particular, and this dream puts you in an infinite hallway, through which you can walk back into the history of nature, and of a place, and choose what period you will try to restore the present to. At the end of this dream hallway, you realize that if you were to restore nature before humans began to impact it, then you would be committing to the restoration of an ice age.
Driving to Ojai one afternoon in April, I couldn’t help but let my thoughts wander. After all, I was about to spend an afternoon at Taft Gardens and Nature Preserve, and interview their inaugural Art in Nature Residency artist Cassandra C. Jones.
Barrel, 2019, Archival Ink Jet on Cotton Rag, 30 in x 30 in
Jones uses digital photography to create collage, installation, and video works that present a prismatic reflection of our consumerist lifestyles. She does this to “offer a space of possibility, growth, and discovery.” And within that space, aims to “create experiences that are transformative.”
“We have literally infused ourselves into Nature...and there is no going back,” Jones tells me as we meet one another under century-old native oak trees running into a dry creek bed, at the heart of the Taft Residency project.
I figured the daydream on the drive up here was a good sign that Jones and I might just understand one another today.
CASSANDRA FORAGES FOR INSPIRATION
Jones with Pig Ears flower
Taft Gardens & Nature Preserve
An overarching narrative that can be told about our human species, is that whenever we first show up to a place, things begin to go extinct.
There is a steady growth to the human biomass, to the detriment of other species. It is a worrisome trend. Concretely, it is interesting to be exposed to a remix artist hot on the trail of the wreckage of humanity, with images of the proliferation of human objects, waste objects especially, the detritus of our ever-expanding biomass, and explore the question with her:
Where is this evolution, this infusion of Nature with our plastic waste, taking us?
All of this in the midst of what I would call a museum-level conservation and education effort by Taft Gardens, spanning more than a dozen of the most beautiful square acres anywhere on the planet.
But what do we do when we realize that this is a planet that has been completely altered to meet our human needs?
Some thoughts go through my head as I carefully review what Jones has accomplished on the walls of her studio...
Jones with Leucospermum (Pincushion) Flowers
Jones’ studio at Taft with Leucospermum Wallpaper made from images of Mardigras Beads and Slinkies, Site Specific
“Whatever you do, don’t google ‘nano plastics and apples.’ It will haunt you.”
Ballooming, 2020, Archival Ink Jet on Cotton Rag, 24 in x 24 in
In art history, our first American landscape art always placed human beings into the scene as tiny figures. This made for the sheer vastness of the American landscape to be depicted as overwhelming in scale, wild, and fecund. As American art progressed, the humans in the scene have become steadily larger and more abundant. In fact, in many current works, artists are desperately clinging to ever more microscopic images of “landscape” (close-ups of plants and trees, cellular representations of plant matter, and local scenes of human-inflicted environmental devastation). Everywhere now, human beings have outsized nature on an incredibly worrisome scale and at an even more worrisome rate. Jones’ work has channeled this trend with near perfection, even using some of the tools of the very technology that may have gotten us into this mess, to attempt to raise awareness as to how we might use what we have become to keep our race from self-inflicted extinction.
Reminiscent of toile wallpaper with a sense of place and purpose, the compelling work of Jones’ I viewed that beautiful afternoon will draw you in with its peaceful imagery; and yet, looking closer, it's plain to see that she has concealed to the casual viewer a vision of catastrophic human environmental and social impact, stemming directly from our own choices. The repetitive imagery of mylar balloons, mardi gras beads, beach balls, billiard balls, slinkies, even emojis, draws the careful eye into razor-sharp attention — to how we have replaced human connection with meaningless plastic shapes, adorning ourselves and our loved ones with these disposable talismans, as we consume ourselves and the planet to death.
Aloe of Sixes, 2021, Archival Ink Jet on Cotton Rag, 30 in x 38 in
There is a Euro-American idea that Nature is virgin and when it is violated, then we must restore it to “wild”. But Nature is not a thing apart from humans, it’s a thing humans actually tend to and participate in. Before the first European explorers, there were lots and lots of people here it turns out, altering their environments, according to their worlds. Ojai and its historical culture of conservation is one result of a rich human relationship with the parts of the natural environment that humans have tended since before the measure of time itself and has not yet completely gone away.
Grevillea Wallpaper, 2021, Detail, Site Specific
This point lingered in my mind as I walked away from the work of Cassandra C. Jones, framed by an experiment in intelligent conservation, whose founders and operators surely had the same thought as I did — that Cassandra was a more than excellent choice to break the bottle on the ship of the effort. A common logic abiding between a residency and an artist is one of the most fulfilling things to witness. The mutual benefit inspires in ways that can only be measured later.
“I read a statistic that said you have to use a cotton bag 7,000 times to offset...one plastic bag— OMG!” Jones exclaims a little later in our visit, clearly moved.
I thought to myself, I wonder if Taft Gardens and this residency somehow offsets a few thousand of those uses, per human who visits these gardens and experiences a change of conscience?
Party Aloe, 2021, Archival Ink Jet on Cotton Rag, 12 in x 12 in
Those of us who choose to plant trees in this life, do not get the pleasure of harvesting them…
Shifting back into reality at the end of our visit, Jones shared with me how much she resisted creating this body of work, for fear of unnecessarily lecturing and making people feel uncomfortable.
Jones’ work is a statement, but it’s also an appeal, which can get a bit dicey for an artist. It is my opinion that she’s nailed something down for us that’s even more important because a consensus builds daily that we are living in a determining decade in the history of the human race. A literal do-or-die moment. I am grateful for artists like Jones who do not whisper but scream.
See the Show
Opening May 29th, 2021
In collaboration with the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Taft Gardens will welcome visitors for a TICKETED yet FREE opening during the day, which includes a self guided tour of the gardens. They have limited capacity so reservations are required.
