Nuclear Waste and Chicken Bones
Artist Hannah Chalew asks how we got here—and what's next
Imagine yourself a giant, romping along through the Louisiana marsh. You notice an unaccounted-for oil pipe, protruding from the water like a weed. When you reach down to pluck it from the ground, out of the dripping water comes an entire framework of plant life growing around and along this skeletal rusting infrastructure, placed by ambition and left by apathy. This is something akin to Terraforming in the Anthropocene, New Orleans artist Hannah Chalew’s 2018 sculptural installation in City Park.
Chalew said that she seeks, as much as possible, more public non-traditional venues for her work, hoping to bring it to people who might not feel comfortable entering an art space, or otherwise seeking out art. Placing this installation in City Park was particularly rewarding. “[It] was really exciting because people would literally happen upon the work and have to make sense of it through the experience, drawn in by the beauty of the plants and the lights at night, only to discover the rusty infrastructure and embedded plastic waste from which the plants were growing. I think there are mundane plastic objects in the installation that everyone can recognize and feel some complicity with the issues at stake, an ugliness amidst the beauty that will resonate with people.”
“I think it’s important that these movements be led by those suffering from environmental injustice—the people of color and indigenous fence-line communities where the effects of climate change are not hard to imagine because their lives have already been massively affected. " —Hannah Chalew
The work’s name comes from an event, in August 2016, when time changed. The International Geological Congress met in Cape Town to discuss and ultimately propose a new epoch in the history of Earth called the Anthropocene. This era—originally proposed to begin around 1950—would be easily recognizable in the fossil record by the proliferation of nuclear waste, plastic residue, and chicken bones in our soil layer. Such exclusively “human” artifacts of the epoch are also hidden in the oversized dirt clots clinging to the frame of Terraforming in the Anthropocene. Here and there, a candy wrapper peeps out, adjacent to a single-use white fork, opposite a rubber footpad, all joined by moss and grasses growing in real time over the wired hut of pipes.
Chalew’s particular environmental consciousness takes in these effects of human activity, then asks how we got here and how we carry this conversation forward. Her work manifests in almost a decade of paper drawings and sculptural installations composing a portfolio that walks the line between the graphic and the hypnotic. Her reputation is linked to the medium of sculpture, yet she thinks of herself as a draftsman. “Drawing is where I started and how all of my work originates, whether it ends up as a work on paper or as an immersive installation. I think of my installations as drawings in space, and often my more ‘traditional’ drawings are informed by—and in turn inform—my works in space.”
Chalew’s mindfulness of the issues facing the Anthropocene is one in which community takes center stage. Her work speaks to art’s ability to both generate and be generated by groups. If serious action is going to be taken towards reforming homo sapiens’ relationship to their planet, she believes it will come from grassroots movements influencing public policy. “I think it’s important that these movements be led by those suffering from environmental injustice—the people of color and indigenous fence-line communities where the effects of climate change are not hard to imagine because their lives have already been massively affected. In South Louisiana, I’m thinking of Rise St. James—a group of folks from around “Cancer Alley” [the industrial corridor in the River Parishes]—who are organizing against all the petrochemical companies that keep popping up around their town and poisoning them. L’eau Est La Vie, the indigenous-led resistance movement against the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, has been doing brave direct action protests against the tail end of the Dakota Access Pipeline. In New Orleans, there is a coalition that is fighting a new natural gas plant, which is set to be located in a predominately black and Vietnamese community.”
“I believe that by creating environments where people have to literally confront what will happen to our everyday cultural detritus, and contemplate the relationship between oil extraction, plastic production, and an uncertain future, I’m creating spaces where people can be moved to shift their perception, or at least be temporarily shaken out of their denial and complacency.”—Hannah Chalew
Chalew’s unapologetic social justice emphasis can be found especially in her more recent works on paper. In her 2019 work, Abundance Undermined, she visualizes New Orleans’ Gordon Plaza. The community, settled in the western 9th ward, sits atop a hundred-year-old deposit of toxic garbage, through which run its waterlines and other urban vitals. Chalew gives us an illustrated cake slice of the community complete with exposed subterranean debris and waste bursting forth in spite of the concrete slabs that so superficially conceal them. The image bows slightly at the center, much like a fish-eye lens effect, further illustrating the spillage. True to her cause, the paper and ink composing the massive drawing are homemade.
More recently, Chalew has begun visualizing the inevitable future. Her 2018 residency with the Joan Mitchell Center culminated in a sculptural installation entitled Entropical Futures, which was displayed at the Center until January 2019. Entropy, like apathy, is a force of cumulative passivity, and Entropical Futures envisions a kind of anti-greenhouse farm with isolated planets of dirt, reminiscent of those found in Terraforming the Anthropocene, attached to repurposed pipes and light fixtures. The installation chaotically expands to fill a huge portion of the room, as if strewn about like debris from a storm. Viewers were forced to duck and maneuver with care, as though walking through the aftermath of some great event past. In messaging more sinister than that of Terraforming, Entropical juxtaposes fake, plastic plants alongside real ones, emphasizing the optimistic but tentative irony of it all: that in spite of our shifting the environment for centuries to come, nature adapts. “I believe that by creating environments where people have to literally confront what will happen to our everyday cultural detritus, and contemplate the relationship between oil extraction, plastic production, and an uncertain future, I’m creating spaces where people can be moved to shift their perception, or at least be temporarily shaken out of their denial and complacency.”
“I believe that art has the power to reach people and make them feel emotions on issues that can otherwise be hard to digest or confront.”—Hannah Chalew
Despite the rebuke her work is meant to express—a forced confrontation with the late twenty-first century epidemic of microplastics in ground wells, in the water used for crops, which in turn feed the populace—Chalew is not without hope. “Another rewarding part of both those installations was that they were primarily presented to younger folks. The installation at City Park was at Grow Dat Youth Farm, an urban farm and youth development program, and Delgado Community College, which is about fifty percent 18–24-year-olds. Young people will be inheriting all these problems and will have to ultimately deal with the mess we are leaving of our planet. I think we need to be educating the next generation about these ideas as early as possible and also promoting creative problem-solving.”
Chalew’s unwillingness to strictly separate the spatial from the flat in her body of work might serve as an apt metaphor for how we ought to think of the species-wide responsibility we have to ourselves and our environment, reflecting a necessary evolution from thinking of such things as linear, problem-solution issues to realizing them as the three-dimensional challenges that they are. Separated, cut-and-dried methods won’t tackle single-use plastics, unregulated fossil fuel use, and the increasing supply of human waste. Rather, these issues must all be taken on at once and from multiple angles. Climate change is a thing so massive, touching so many areas of our existence, that it takes a conscious effort to wrap our minds around it—but art can assist that process.
[Read this: Jonathan Meyers paints hard-hitting allegories]
Chalew references the philosopher Timothy Morton’s term “hyperobject” as a way to talk about climate change—an “entity of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that it defeats traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.”
“But,” she said, “I believe that art has the power to reach people and make them feel emotions on issues that can otherwise be hard to digest or confront.”
Chalew’s work’s immediacy, its frankness, and its cutting words are tinted with an impenetrable optimism that sees the bed we have made for ourselves and suggests that panic is not the solution, but rather education. Education topples giants; if Chalew’s art and activism can help that process along, its value exceeds the detritus it is made of. “I don’t think New Orleans will be here forever but it’s important for me to be here while it is, and to be making work that addresses what it means to live in a time of global warming with an uncertain future, specifically in South Louisiana.”