VANISHING/VISIBLE

artwork image: “Warming Skies, Antarctica”, 40” x 60”, Mixed Media

OPENING RECEPTION

FEB 9, FRIDAY

6-9 PM

Narratives of climate change often place the issue as an apocalyptic threat to life on Earth, but the tragedy of the climate crisis is also an opportunity to practice anew radically different ways of living – in better relation with the environment and one another – in the here and now. Vanishing/Visible is a visual arts and poetry collaboration of examination, reflection, and response to the global climate crisis and its ecological impacts. It encourages us to move beyond the existential into the embodied, beyond apathy into empowerment. Its visual and poetic provocations aim to ground abstractions about a dying planet within an awareness of both the natural wonders being lost, and the ways that this loss shows up in our federal, state, and municipal politics around land, labor, food, transportation, and housing.

This exhibition features paintings of vanishing icescapes within the Polar regions by artist Nerys Levy who has worked in both the Arctic and Antarctic. These icescape paintings will be joined by the work of ten youth poets from Orange County who, together with the poet laureate of Carrboro, Liza Wolff-Francis, and with Cortland Gilliam, the poet laureate of Chapel Hill, will respond in poetry to Nerys’s artwork and to the greater significance of climate change for our lasting ecologies. In addition to having their poetic responses exhibited alongside the paintings, the youth poets will return to PEEL to share their work at the February 9, Second Friday reception to lead the community, through poetry and art, recommitting to a more equitible, loving, and livable world.