Art for A Melted World: Environmentalist Art… Again

In the early 2000s, Presidential Candidate Al Gore inundated the populace with speculations as to how coastal North America will soon be underwater, and since then it has been a popular talking point and reason to throw celebrity charity benefits. I find myself highly skeptical around any environmental motif presented in culture, as it seems that any who find easy use in reference to a maternal Earth as a wounded celestial saint believe themselves entitled to an obligatory round of applause from any who would dare to call themselves decent human beings. I was recently met with the work of Sanaz Mazinani, a Toronto-based artist whom the Vancouver Art Gallery has taken displaying one of his pieces in the public gaze. The piece Offsite: Sanaz Mazinani has captured much of the same sentiment that Al Gore prophesied, exhibiting a foretelling of an imaginative future of a ‘melted-world’ in Vancouver 2080, where the method of commute most speculated may resemble a Venetian-style boat ride. The piece depicts a few floating leafy survivors and dimensionally sparse glacial fixtures laden atop of a mirror-like surface reflecting the exhibit back at itself. The exhibit is certainly imaginative, attempting to display the projections of climate weary scientists but it feels as though the realism intended is lost, or rather fumbled, by the somewhat cartoonish presence of the faux icy mounds and fashionable billboard tableau mounted at the rear of the exhibit. I have personally always found that practical approaches to art at least honorably yield a clear message, but perhaps this exhibit might have found the remedy in a more abstract representation of the intended idea. The mirror-like representation of the water in the exhibit is actually quite haunting perhaps the most powerful of all the fixtures. A subtle and darkly reflective reminder of impending watery doom otherwise perturbed by obvious fixtures indicative of the largely ornamental sentiment of the environmentalist motif.

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