Dissertation

"Images, Theater, Embodied Experiences: How ecoartists are shifting consciousness around the climate crisis"

Given our myriad environmental crises due to climate change and the inability of scientific data and journalism to convey its urgency, great numbers of artists have been stepping up to communicate the problems and offer solutions. I’m investigating the possibilities and strengths of different artistic media and approaches in affecting the public’s perceptions and providing new epistemologies of climate change. Focusing on four highly visible contemporary practices, I will analyze how their art stimulates emotions, the senses, and ambiguity in the brain, using theories from neuroscience and psychology. How do these artists engage with the Anthropocene, hyperobjects, and the nature/culture network in ways that make us care? How do images, embodied experiences, and theater work as rhetorical agents that cause us to question our ethics and consumer behaviors?

Committee

Karl Kusserow, John Wilmerding Curator of American Art, Princeton University Art Museum

Finis Dunaway, Professor of History, Trent University

Julie Reiss, Independent Scholar, juliereiss.com