Untitled

Sarah Hoskins, American, born 1965

Untitled, 2017

The liveliness of the trees and humanistic limbs of the branches give mystery to the Appalachian Mountains—the oldest mountain range in the world. The suspense of not knowing what is coming behind the next rolling hill is symbolic in this photo of the suspense of not knowing when the next Mountain top removal explosion will occur. The shrubs to the left with their human-like features seem peaceful, but that is just until they, too, are detonated. The region of Appalachia is in critical danger. The mining industry has taken over the region, bullied it to the point of little hope. The business of mining has an incomparable amount of less value than the land it is destroying. The people of the industry, who continue to hurt the land, are genuinely hurting themselves in the process. They inhabit the land of Appalachia, but they do not care about it; they do not care for the life of the animals that are their neighbors or the trees that provide their life force. Art and Environmental Justice is largely about humanizing the victims of environmental injustice. In this photograph, the land looks alive, and Hoskins humanizes the primary victim of environmental injustice in Appalachia – the land. Label by Annabel Bentley

Figure 9.30 (Eve’s Photo of an Empty Coal Train)

Eve, American

Figure 9.30 (Eve’s Photo of an Empty Coal Train)

This photo ties together MTR’s impact on the economy, nature, and the day-to-day lives of local people. The photo shows a coal train going past with no coal on it while in the distance is a bare mountain that has been subjected to MTR. To the right side is a home, localizing the scene. The empty train gives a sense of the economic devastation of the region as people have lost jobs and have been forced to leave the region as MTR has become the dominant form of coal mining. While not shown, the coal extracted from MTR is now transported by trucks on local roads, a dangerous practice that has caused many accidents, something deeply felt in this local context. Presented by a local woman at a community meeting, this photo asks other local women to critically consider the tolls of MTR on their safety, their community, and the natural world. Label by Caitlin Blomo

Only God Should Move Mountains. Stop Mountaintop Removal Mining of the Appalachians

LEAF (Lindquist Environmental Appalachian Fellowship), American

Natural Resources Defense Council, American

Only God Should Move Mountains. Stop Mountaintop Removal Mining of the Appalachians, 2009

LEAF, a small Tennessee-based environmental coalition used this advertisement to promote their work of mobilizing Christians against mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. The text of their message is clear and accompanies a prominent image on the left side of the billboard of an autumn dusk in the mountains. The otherwise idyllic image is interrupted by a gulf in the center of the image where blasted rock and roads have destroyed and displaced the mountains. Though this image does not treat the more dire human costs of mountaintop removal, it is notable that no human beings are present in the image. This billboard serves as a direct counter to coal-industry messaging (also commonly using billboards) that coal extraction provides jobs. Mountaintop removal provides polluting fossil fuel not without first destroying mountains and creating toxic byproducts that pollute community water supplies and for whose benefit? Label by Morgan Brittain

The Red Tulips

Dustin Hall, American, born 1999

The Red Tulips, 2018

In this painting, Hall uses abstraction and color blocking to create an anthropomorphized landscape of queer figures. Painted on the back of a scavenged cardboard poster frame and hung with scrap wire, the painting contains two separate blocks of color, the upper block in yellow and the lower block in green. Within in each block, spirals of other colors swirl to create forms suggestive of penises, vaginas, breasts, and faces. Uniting and blurring the boundaries between the two blocks are three distinct, humanlike figures in white, black, and gray. The bodies which appear in the middle, with their combination of female and male primary and secondary sex characteristics, do not fit cisnormative understandings of biological femininity and masculinity. Just as the figures blur between the landscape and each other, so too do they blur between binary constructions of sex and gender. The abstraction of the lines in the lower half of the painting further enables this sexual and gender ambiguity. Phallic forms whirl into yonic forms which then whirl into breasts and faces and hands until each form is simultaneously recognizable and unrecognizable, disrupting biological binaries of sex and gender (as well as binaries separating humans and nature) to the point where such binaries become incomprehensible. The figure in the center of the painting grounds this chaos, signaling that an alternative to shaky models of binary gender resides in the transcendence of this binary in favor of a body that recognizes the fluidity of gender and sexual categories. Label by Maxwell Cloe