Cynthia Camlin

Camlin is a professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. Her work in painting and drawing explores environmental change through abstracted forms. For example, several series of paintings present marine ice as complex structures undermined by melt and movement, registering the effects of climate change while evoking human systems undermined by environmental realities.  Her interdisciplinary courses, “Art and Ecology,” and “Figure and Symbol,” expand the normal pedagogy of studio art. “Salish Wonder Room” was a changing collaborative project by Camlin and her Art and Ecology students in Fall 2018. In a room designed as a cabinet of curiosities within the Western Gallery exhibition, “Modest Forms of Biocultural Hope,” the project tracked students’ research and experimentation as they responded to scientific research, field study, indigenous practices, and contemporary art. The project addressed the question, “What if we saw other species not only as objects to be collected, preserved and studied, but as living beings who are themselves holders of knowledge?”

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Douglas Cushing

Douglas Cushing is a Ph.D. Candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Cushing will be the guest curator for the Symposium’s art exhibit, “Listening to the Anthropocene.” His dissertation, provisionally titled “Inter-war Romanticism, Revolution, and Modernism on Display in transition,” approaches Eugene Jolas’s little magazine transition (1927-38) as a virtual gallery space and meeting place, as well as a transatlantic vehicle for the transmission, circulation, and transformation of avant-garde ideas. Cushing’s past research includes work on Marcel Duchamp’s relationship with the writings of the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), beginning before the advent of Dada and Surrealism. Cushing was the 2013-14 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Prints and Drawings, and European Paintings at the Blanton Museum of Art, where he subsequently curated Goya: Mad Reason(June 19 to September 25, 2016). Cushing’s most recent major awards include the 2017-18 Houghton Mifflin Fellowship in Publishing History, from the Houghton Library at Harvard University, a University Graduate Continuing Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin, and the 2018-19 Vivian L. Smith Fellowship at the Menil Collection, in Houston, Texas.

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Erik Hagen

Erik Hagen examines contemporary natural resource issues and humanity’s influence on natural systems over time. Hagen’s installation “Galveston and Texas City, Year 2517” exhibited in Houston and his solo exhibition “Fossils of the Anthropocene” toured DC and Houston, and was reviewed by the Smithsonian. Hagen’s book and art exhibit called “Exploring Beauty,” a collection of essays and portraits investigating physical appearance and identity, showed in The Hague and in Antwerp in 2010. Hagen studied art and art history at Carleton College (BA) and won a post-graduate art residency at Carleton for one year. Hagen has additional degrees in environmental engineering and water resources management from the University of Washington (BSCE, MSCE). He directed water-resources planning and operations for the Washington DC metro area, and later worked with the U.S. Congress on environmental legislation. Hagen moved to Houston in 2012 and is Vice President of the Houston Visual Arts Alliance, a non-profit artist membership organization. His artworks are found in public and private collections across the country and abroad.

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Kelly Jazvac

Kelly Jazvac (b. Hamilton, Ontario) works primarily with plastic waste. In doing so, her art probes the permanence of disposability. Jazvac is also a member of the Synthetic Collective: an interdisciplinary group of researchers who study plastics pollution. Recent exhibitions include the CAC Brétigny (France); Gallery TPW (Toronto); Fierman Gallery (New York); and the CAG (Vancouver). Her work has been written about in e-flux journal, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, artforum.com, The New Yorker, Border Crossings, Canadian Art, The Brooklyn Rail and C Magazine. She is represented by Fierman Gallery, and is a professor in sculpture at Concordia University.

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Lorella Paleni

Lorella Paleni is an Italian-born artist living and working between Paris and New York. Using painting, monotype, and video she investigates various subjects including ecology, women, nature, and the relations between humans and nonhuman animals. She received her MFA from Columbia University and her BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice (IT). Recent exhibitions include a solo show at E.Tay Gallery, NYC (2017) and a solo show at MagicBeans Gallery, Berlin (2016). Paleni has completed residencies at Catwalk Institute, Catskill, NY; Le CouveNt, Ausitz, France; AZ West with Andrea Zittel, Joshua Tree, California; and the Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY.