Unseen California: Language Has No Weather

Opens Sunday, November 17, 2024

Unseen California is an interdisciplinary arts research initiative that engages diverse artist voices with research themes relevant to California’s future utilizing the public land of the University of California’s Natural Reserve System.

Language Has No Weather includes works form Unseen California’s first cohort of artist researchers, Mercedes Dorame, Karolina Karlic, Tarrah Krajnak, Dionne Lee, and Aspen Mays.

These five women artists took part as the inaugural group of Artist Researchers working across the California landscape on public land that has largely been used for scientific research, the UC Natural Reserves. Together on this journey they create their own new artworks set out to reframe California’s cultural histories and ecological landscapes beyond canonical perspectives. The (42) UC Natural Reserve System (UCNRS) sites are locations stewarded by the University of California. The impact of the Artists -in- Residence engaging with the UCNRS generates novel opportunities for art-making and pedagogy as well as knowledge exchange for seeing new ways to engage the natural world as it relates to environmental and social justice.

Each Artist Researcher’s approach is unique and open-ended, thus creating a place for personal projects that freely diverge while challenging overarching concepts, such as “nature” and “landscape,” and address urgent discourse around California land. This long-term research initiative gives these cultural producers opportunities to carve out novel conceptual and interdisciplinary approaches to propose new understandings of the pressing issues that face California’s terrain, its ecological economies, and its bio-cultural diversities.

The artists of Unseen California aim to “see” (by means of visualization and acknowledgement) the multivalent histories that compose the California landscape. This includes indigenous stewardship and regenerative practices – on ceded and unceded land – and the role of settler colonialism and imperialism in construction of these histories. Unseen California invites artists to engage in new types of creative ecology not yet considered/addressed in full within institutional spaces and the photographic canon of Western photography.