Justin Duyao on Marinta Skupin
The Golden Hour (detail), 2022, India ink on paper with laser cutting
[Image description: A close-up photograph of a hazy, seaside landscape painting, into which a seemingly endless list of decimals and data points are cut.]
Ten years ago, surviving a “hot summer day” in my hometown in Oregon looked like slinking to the pool and eating Otter Pops. Without a doubt, these were the loveliest days of the year. The average temperature in July was 78 degrees, gas cost $2.80 per gallon, and really only the rich families had A.C. in their homes.
Today, people simply can’t survive without A.C. In early August, temperatures in Portland, Oregon, soared to 108, while cities from Seattle to San Ysidro broke heat records they’d just set the year before. In the same season that observed Hawai’i residents pick through the rubble in Lāhainā and San Diego brace for Hurricane Hilary, Marinta Skupin opened her first solo exhibition at Art Produce, titled You Will Never Be Lovelier.
Inspired by a quote from David Benioff’s 2004 film, Troy—“Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now” [1]—Skupin’s collection of paintings, drawings, and works on paper mourns the ongoing destruction of the planet, at the same time that it paves the way for a new way of understanding environmental crises. In one cohesive and eerily punctual gesture, Skupin brings together climate research, critical essays, and poetry to begin to make sense of the ways the world has changed (and is changing), as global warming uproots our assumptions about climate norms.
The Golden Hour, 2022, India ink on paper with laser cutting, 24 x 18 in. each
[Image description: Two images of a grid of 15 paintings—one of the entire wall and another close up—capture the enormity of a list of data points, carved into a landscape painting of a beach scene.]
To create The Golden Hour (2022), which foregrounds a dizzying list of data points that are carved into a massive, wall-sized portrait of the La Jolla shoreline, Skupin looked to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s records of ocean temperatures in La Jolla since 2021 [2]. In doing so, Skupin captures how completely this data—and by extension, the effects of global warming—unsettles our ideas about the serenity of the ocean. When Skupin watches cool blue waves crash on San Diego’s beaches, she cannot un-see this data. And neither should we.
When walking through the exhibition with her, Skupin told me about the Sussex-born painter, lecturer, and writer Simon Morley, whose writings on the contemporary sublime inspired her to explore the contradictory feelings of awe and horror that many experience in the face of a rapidly changing climate. Skupin explained that, when learning about the immediate effects of climate change (i.e. changing weather patterns, warming oceans, drought, famine, mass displacement, etc.), a feeling of “terrific sublimity” overcomes us, which, in Morely’s words, translates to the “heightened and perversely exalted feeling we often get from being threatened by something beyond our control or understanding” [3].
The American artist Mike Kelley made a very similar observation, in comparing the sublime and the uncanny, both in art and life: “I see the sublime as coming from the natural limitations of our knowledge: when we are confronted with something thatʼs beyond our limits of acceptability or that threatens to expose some repressed thing, then we have this feeling of the uncanny” [ibid].
Aside from working to devise solutions to climate crisis, perhaps the most ambiguous task before us is imagining how to navigate the ways climate crises have affected and will affect our lives. Not only how to make sense of the creeping feeling of the uncanny, in the face of grief and of dread, but also how to make sense of what life might look like in the future. For those of us drive past a hillside littered with blackened tree stumps on our way to work, for those of us who have been displaced because of an extreme weather event, for those of us who have lost our jobs, lost our loved ones, lost our hope in a world that comes together to devise solutions to problems that transcend everything we know—the future is shrouded in a thick fog of uncertainty.
I Asked AI (1-6) (detail), 2023, engraving on paper, 15 x 19 in. each. Photo: Nanzi Muro
[Image description: A close-up photograph of a series of text-based pieces depicting a sentence of text printed onto white paper, the closest one reading “We would miss the incredibly array of life forms and the wonder and awe they inspire.” ]
In her deeply poetic series of engravings on paper, I Asked AI (2023), Skupin looked to another corner of the datasphere to make sense of the staggering uncanniness of our ongoing climate crisis. By compiling responses generated by ChatGPT to the question “What will we miss in the event of a climate apocalypse?” Skupin put a universe of complicated and difficult feelings to words.
“We may miss the sense of possibility and the belief that we can create a better world for future generations,” reads one. “It could leave us longing for the beauty and serenity that nature offers,” reads another.
From end to end, Skupin’s work proves the idea Audre Lorde put to paper in her 1977 manifesto of an essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” that “poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives” [4]. For Skupin, poetry is not only the purest way of knowing the world; it is also the most powerful way to relate to and understand one another.
In Skupin’s art, which is a deeply poetic attempt to understand the state of the world, we are able to come face to face with the features of our reality that are the most difficult to reconcile: the terrifying, the awe-inspiring, the unimaginable, and the unjust—not to gawk or wallow in our grief and in our dread, but to be reminded that each of these realities is bigger than me and you and everyone we know. It extends beyond us. Climate change affects you directly, yes, but it also transcends (and even contradicts the importance of) individuality altogether.
Hold the Star, 2022, laser-cut film over India ink on paper, 24 x 18 in. Photo: Nanzi Muro
[Image description: On top of a sheet of paper painted light blue with scribbles of hand-written text hangs another sheet, into which the lines of a poem are screen-cut and repeated, over and over, until the words overlap and detach from the page.]
On the opposite wall, Skupin’s Hold the Star (2022) superimposes laser-cut excerpts from simple ant’s essay, “fugitive ecologies: Finding freedom in the wilderness,” over hand-written excerpts from another piece on paper, cementing this idea. This time, Skupin uses poetry to distill a complex idea into one simple phrase: “We must hold the dark / We must hold the mud / We must hold the fear,” part of the piece reads.
In simple ant’s work, they define a fugitive ecology as one way to subvert the world’s decided ignorance toward the effects of climate crisis on disadvantaged communities. They also stretch the normative understanding of individual importance and argue that, for each of us, “There is no direct path to freedom.” Not alone, anyway. “Instead of overtly destroying a structure, worldview, belief system, way of being or way of acting, a fugitive moves with the shadows and focuses on existing beyond the chains that enslave us.” Further, for any kind of fugitive ecology to take root, it must first embrace the idea that we are an extension of our climate in crisis. We are neither innocent bystanders nor accomplices. “Freedom only becomes possible when we allow the Earth to become an extension and expression of our self” [5].
For Skupin, simple ant’s words “We must hold the dark / We must hold the mud / We must hold the fear” embody this way of thinking. As simple ant wrote themselves: “freedom comes when we have the courage to confront death. When we confront death, we are reborn, and when we are reborn we are able to see the world clearly for what it is and choose to move in a different way” [ibid].By capturing the uncanny feeling of hope, dread, and grief that so many communities carry with them every day, Skupin imagines a new framework for understanding and acting on global crises. Art, in her view, is neither static nor reactive—it is a living, breathing form of communication that can hold pain, urgency, and hope at the same time.
Justin Duyao is HereIn’s Contributing Editor.
Notes:
Troy. Directed by David Benioff. 2004; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, Inc.
Data from Shore Stations Program, sponsored at Scripps Institution of Oceanography by California Department of Parks and Recreation, Natural Resources Division, Award# C1670003.
Morley, Simon. “Staring into the contemporary abyss: The contemporary sublime.” Tate, 2010. Accessed September 7, 2023. https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-20-autumn-2010/staring-contemporary-abyss.
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. W.W. Norton & Company, 2020.
ant, simple. “fugitive ecologies: Finding freedom in the wilderness.” Root Work Journal, 2020.