Betsy Jaeger, American, born 1954
Kitchen Window Looking North, 2010
Artist Betsy Jaeger is a native of Morgantown, West Virginia, where she collaborates with her local arts community center to document the changes perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry in her exhibition “Inside Looking Out.” Jaeger has watched her hometown be used as a testing ground for strip mining, extracted to ruin after the mining company eventually declared bankruptcy. In its entirety, the exhibition uses windows as metaphors for keeping us safe and allowing us to look outside of ourselves. This particular image is of the inside and outside of Jaeger’s kitchen windows. On the left, the interior space of the room floats amidst her front yard, while the exterior vision on the right underscores the reality: the house sparrow attacking a bluebird nest against a background of the “invasive species” of the strip mine. Label by Kristin Rheins