A Braided River Migrates Through Time, 2024
E-Waste, Car Parts, items salvaged from Site of Schuylkill Center Grounds, Dirt, Audio and Video
Installation Views from Slow-Burning Rapture at the Schuylkill Center, Philadelphia PA
Text By Curator Kristina Murray
In A Braided River Migrates Through Time, Talia Greene transforms waste into beauty by crafting electronic waste, salvaged car parts, mud and rocks into a complex braided river. In this work, the artist oscillates through time, visually and sonically cueing the memory of a river as a site for contemplation and a relic of consumption. The materials are both visceral and imaginative, painting a mental picture of post-apocalyptic zen gardens, bleeding arteries and destroyed civil infrastructures.
The electronic waste has been sourced from PAR Recycle Works, a North Philadelphia nonprofit electronics recycler that provides transitional employment to people returning from prison, embedding the artwork with a powerful ethos: that environmental justice is synonymous with social justice. Greene’s artwork invites us to ponder: how can we use environmental destruction as a starting point for imagining alternate ways of living with our waste?
A recurring theme in my artistic practice is our relationship to nature: our efforts to tame, destroy, or separate ourselves from it, but also the ways we are a part of it. To understand the present, I often look to the past — appropriating, mimicking, and drawing attention to historic imagery. In my projects, I reference both artifacts from the past and speculative futures, asking viewers to imagine the consequences and the possibilities which could arise from our present actions.
In my project from 2022, After Audubon, I use appropriation to wrestle with the place of this consequential figure in the history of natural science, one who is simultaneously important for his artistic talent and dogged commitment to his subject, and problematic for his support of slavery and the role that hunting and taxidermy played in his artistic process. In the print, After Audubon (with invasive European Starling), I have turned Audubon into a living statue. He is both frozen in time like so many other white male figures from history, and also ironically being attacked by the non-native, invasive European Starlings which colonize and often destroy the American landscape.
In the piece, After Henry in the Woods (2022), I transform a cover page from an edition of Thoreau’s Walden which depicts a springtime view of his cabin, into a bleaker winter landscape. Words from the quote on the original cover page are crossed out leaving only the phrase, “I propose to brag lustily if only to wake my neighbors up.” As in much of my work, there is a blurry line between past and present. In the new drawing, a satellite dish perches on the cabin’s chimney, while a chain link fence and no trespassing sign separate the cabin from its surroundings. Here, the American ideals of rugged individualism and a romanticized wilderness are fused with the contemporary right wing ideology of survivalists and anti-government militants such as Ammon Bundy, who claim the wilderness for their own, yet refuse to acknowledge the rights of others, especially those who were there before.
After Audubon (selected plates), 2022
Gouache and Cut Paper
Installation views from Natural History at Past Present Projects, Philadelphia, PA
In the cut paper series, After Audubon, I take a softer approach to appropriation in the form of meticulously re-rendered plates of warblers from Audubon’s Birds of America. In each piece, I have replaced the flora in the original Audubon prints with unraveling and hastily repaired chain link fencing. Warblers busily attempt to build their nests with electrical wires which adorn the fences, while cowbirds menacingly surround them. The project addresses a current ecological crisis - the rapid decline of common birds in North America resulting from human expansion and climate change induced habitat loss. The insertion of the cowbirds also takes inspiration from a specific story of near extinction - that of Kirtland’s warbler. This rare bird was on the verge of extinction due to habitat loss, but also from a non-human colonizer: a brood parasite called the cowbird. Brood parasites lay their eggs into other birds’ nests, and trick the nest builders into raising cowbird chicks. While warblers are among the species of common birds which have seen a drastic decline in numbers, cowbird numbers are increasing, thanks in part to their appropriation of resources from other species. Kirtland’s warbler numbers, while still tenuous, are now increasing due to the concerted efforts by humans to contain cowbirds. These stories point to our complex position, as both colonizers and stewards, within natural ecosystems.
Obsolete, 2016
Gouache on paper, each 20" x 20" matted
Obsolete is a series of portraits of obsolete Macintosh computers and scavenger birds, painted in a style reminiscent of Renaissance drawings.
Memorial Ruins, 2015
Archival Pigment Prints, 17"x12"
The series of prints, Memorial Ruins references representations of ruins in the Romantic tradition, and taps into our timeless fascination with crumbling civilizations. The prints re-imagine images of recent disasters, suggesting a future in which the sites are not erased of the tragedy, but rare given back to nature as wildlife preserves. Each of the sites sit on a continuum between man-made and natural disasters: from the catastrophic loss of life in the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh, to the devastation following the breached levies during Hurricane Katrina. Through a painstaking process of rendering the destruction line by line and then rebuilding a space of renewal atop the devastation, the works become not only intimate memorials but also personal acts of catharsis. Although the new images suggest a kind of romantic re-birth, closer inspection reveals new potential for destruction on a scale less striking to the human eye; a destruction perpetrated by nature on itself.
Precarious Balance, 2015
Installation at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
In the series, Precarious Balance, animals are meticulously rendered in spaces that are empty, save for suggestions of architectural remains. Their detailed rendering, reminiscent of the illustrations that Victorian naturalists intended as a faithful document of animals in their natural habitat, belies their unnatural activities. Here they are perched atop one another, scrambling for prominence. These animals seem forced into unsustainable positions, perhaps as a consequence of diminishing space. The idea of an environment out of whack is taken to a place of absurdity.
Emerging from unexpected corners of the gallery are playful vignettes that counterpoint the seeming formality of the prints. The vignettes create a bridge between the incredible and what may seem possible. A hawk stands atop a pile of dead passenger pigeons. An endangered condor stands wistfully atop a pile of rubble. In one corner of the space, brambles covered in ants seem to push through from an adjacent space.
On the surface, the branches seem to underly the pervading suggestion of ruin. In fact, they point to a more hopeful symbiosis. The spiky pods that grow on the brambles are inspired by the whistling thorn acacia tree, which grows pods for the sole purpose of feeding ants which live on the tree. In turn, the ants protect the tree from animals that would otherwise cause its destruction. Amidst the wreckage, a suggestion of another way is found in an unlikely place.
