Kim Tanzer

My art practices—painting, photography, performance—have always celebrated the Earth’s complex self-regulating processes and critiqued ongoing efforts by humans to control these processes.  The “What’s Next for Earth” project has given me the opportunity to make such connections explicit.  Having practiced and taught architecture for many years, I am convinced art adds the ingredient of wonder to other methods available to change minds, hearts, and behaviors.

Embedded Memory

Instagram Reel

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This Reel is the fourth in a series of short movies that seeks to invoke patterns created across time and space. In each I draw on community-based practices devoted to exploring sustainable living, balancing ecology, economy, and social equity. This Reel utilizes images, stories, and research developed collaboratively with hundreds of people across Gainesville in recent years and collected on a website. Screenshots from that website were used to create this Reel.

Responding to the MAHB call and Richard Heinberg’s discussion of Resilience in Major Sectors—in this case the building industry—this Reel advocates for the preservation of existing built fabric. Existing buildings and their infrastructure contain vast quantities of embodied energy and an equally vast storehouse of embedded memories.

Embodied energy refers to all the energy it takes to make a building: mining, harvesting, fabricating, transporting, assembling, maintaining, and all the CO2 produced in the process. That C02 is already contributing to climate change.

At the same time, memories are embedded in places as we live our lives.

The “settlers” or colonizers of North America benefitted from virtually unlimited access to natural resources and cheap, even “free” labor. It became the norm to demolish and build afresh, rather than to maintain and conserve. The ethos of this Reel is the opposite.

As the well-know saying goes, “the most sustainable building is one that is already built.”

See gainesvilleneighborhoodsunited.org for further information.
©
2024
  • Kim Tanzer

4 medicines: look/imagine

Instagram Reels

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A year ago I made a “fortune teller,” based on four sources of personal inspiration—walking, gardens, forests, and water-- to prompt me to take local excursions exploring resilience in my own community. Following its “instructions” I took a one mile walk along Gainesville’s Highway 441 with a friend. Initially, I thought of the walk as a performance piece, demonstrating the bleakness of that suburban landscape. Instead, I realized that mile included all four of the medicines I need, if in an impoverished form. Using the constraints imposed by Instagram Reels I have continued to explore transformations across time using various primitive time-lapse methods. In this case, I painted before-and-after versions of my walk, framed by the prompts “look” and “imagine.” The small images are painted in watercolor on Strathmore board, scanned, then further painted with watercolor and gel pens. The images are imported into ppt then saved and uploaded as a movie. In reflecting on that walk, and Richard Heinberg’s call to consider essential community assets—food, water, energy, and money—I realized that all these assets could be enhanced anywhere, including along this one mile stretch of parallel highway and railroad tracks. Stormwater ponds and forests could be amplified, gardens could be planted and harvested. All could be accessed on foot or through newly improved mass transit connections. In many cases, what we need is right here, if only we’d look. Can we go further, and imagine it into being?
©
2024
  • Kim Tanzer

Walk Talk Dream Share

Instagram Reel
1996-present

This Reel unspools a series of iterative projects involving community members and architecture students co-creating their local environment. I think of the process as a collaborative ritual involving four stages: walking, talking, dreaming, and sharing. Following the work of anthropologist Victor Turner, I have sought to evoke liminal experiences, where experts and community members merge with each other and the object of their interest—the shared environment.

Beginning in 1996, these projects include participatory design techniques like walking tours and discussions, photo collection, then drawing and model making, urban design explorations, exhibits, and presentations. In each case, multiple intelligences are engaged, and learning is set in the community, not the classroom. The role of expert is upended, as community members and environmental designers often exchange roles.

Artists and critics inspiring this work include Michael Brenson, Mark Dion, Suzi Gablik, Helen & Newton Harrison, Mildred Howard, Mary Jane Jacob, Suzanne Lacy, and Estella Conwill Májozo.

As Richard Heisenberg says, “Resilience will therefore require engagement of all the individual’s multiple intelligences (linguistic, spatial, mathematical, bodily, interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, and naturalistic). Neuroscience research into learning suggests that activities that move beyond linguistic and numeric drills—beyond classrooms and computers and into nature—may be especially effective at engaging the whole person.”

Over the decades, some of the architecture students involved in these projects have themselves become community advocates, while the community activists have come to speak for good, inclusive urban design. This creative problem-solving is called Design. We can design our lives, in all their different facets, to sit more on the 'commonification' side of the page. And by strengthening that practice, we'll find a whole host of unintended pleasant surprises waiting for us. I mean, who doesn't love free lemons? What things do you do that are outside the norm? And why do you love doing it your way?
©
2023
  • Kim Tanzer

Hommage to Dressed Yards

Video

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In towns and cities throughout the American south, African- American neighborhoods have grown up as distinct enclaves within larger urban areas. These neighborhoods, often indistinguishable from other residential areas on city maps, are remarkably different when seen first-hand. A particular range of colors, architectural elements, elaborate front yards and symbolic displays are consistent within and between African American neighborhoods, but nonexistent in other areas.

Neighborhood residents’ common space-making strategies lead to a continual community-wide spatial conversation, which might be characterized as urban-scale performance art. While many neighborhoods could illustrate this singular performance of community, I have found none that do so more successfully than the Fifth Avenue/Pleasant Street neighborhood in Gainesville, Florida.
This video presents a small sampling of specific communal strategies, some handed down through the many generations of the African diaspora. These include call-response gestures, symbol “sampling,” and “signifying” all set in the context of what art historian Grey Gundaker calls “dressed yards.” The streets and their dressed yards form the community’s commons.
As Richard Heisenberg explains, “In most pre-industrial economies, the commons included sources of food as well as natural materials for making tools and building shelters. Everyone who used the commons had a stake in preserving it for the next generation.”
This neighborhood acts as a cooperative, described by Heisenberg as “deliberately foster(ing) voluntary and open membership, democratic member control, member economic participation, cooperation among cooperatives, and concern for community.”
It provides important lessons for all of us.
©
2023
  • Kim Tanzer

FoodCycles

Short video, comprised of sketches from my visits to a market and a garden

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Repetition creates pattern. Pattern is habit. Patterns become teachers.

I have always visited farmers and flea markets when I travel, to sample local cultures. I am similarly drawn to the world’s diverse gardens and farms. Reviewing my photos, I’ve noticed I often make images of multiples. Created by repetitive plants, foods, or recycled goods, these multiples create patterns. Upon reflection, I recognize these patterns as the resultant forms of human actions—accumulated across a season of cultivation, a career of market distribution, or generations of recipes’ production.

I am attracted to the beauty of gardens and markets, but also to the local knowledge they transmit, about growing seasons, regional recipes, local cultures. And, as Richard Heinberg recognizes, food and retail are two major industry sectors where we can redouble our efforts to “relocalize” our economy to combat global climate change.

In this short video, I have tried to invoke the meditative repetitions of Bill Viola’s videos, Laura Dean’s dances, Godfrey Reggio’s films, Philip Glass’s music, and global traditions of chanting and singing in the round. Cycles beget cycles. Can we celebrate our food cycles as art?

Thank you to Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass for “Offerings” and to the Field & Fork Garden, Gainesville Florida and the Périgeaux Market, Dordogne France
©
2023
  • Kim Tanzer

Swerves Off the Grid

Oil on canvas

12” x 12”

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These small paintings are part of an ongoing project called “Watershed Anecdotes” which pairs expressive mappings with abstracted landscape paintings. In each I seek to connect an abstract, Cartesian logic with lived experience.

Each painting reveals the interplay between a road or property boundary—by happenstance located on a subdivision of the Jeffersonian grid--and a swerve, where local features intervene.

The Jeffersonian grid is formally the Public Land Survey System. It was initiated by Thomas Jefferson to efficiently subdivide lands beyond the original 13 colonies and it expanded west as the United States proceeded to conquer the continent. Many roadways and land subdivisions, including every straight line in these paintings, are part of the totalizing logic of the Jeffersonian grid.

Meanwhile, the elements I characterize here as “swerves”—a lake, a river, an old footpath with its totemic tree, and two springs flowing to different watersheds—resist the logic of the grid. These topographies explain, in part, why the terrain portrayed in these paintings has been continuously inhabited for several thousand years. They offer hints toward a more resilient, localized future.

Spatial grids are efficient and apparently egalitarian. Yet by ignoring local circumstances, they reinforce a logic of universality at the expense of the specific and unique. One result is what author Richard Heinberg describes as “globalization’s anti-resilience, or brittleness.” As Heinberg argues, life on our Earth requires “an appropriate balance between centralization and decentralization, and between economic efficiency on one hand, and redundancies that foster resilience on the other.”

I offer this series of paintings as both an example of the spatial logic of capitalism, and a metaphor for its antidote.
©
2023
  • Kim Tanzer

The Four Medicines

Origami folded paper with images and text, 8 ½” x 8 ½”

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Several years ago, in a dream, I encountered a large white bear. He was wearing a medicine pouch in the tradition of an indigenous shaman. I realized the pouch contained medicine, and the white bear wanted me to have it. For years I wondered what that medicine was, and I began thinking actively about the medicine I needed. I came to understand I need four medicines: Water Walking Forests Gardens These situations—a combination of place and active engagement—sustain me. They are the inspiration and often the subject of my art. They also, separately and in combination with each other, sustain human life. They are systems at the intersection of the Earth’s ecology and human behavior. In my life, these medicines interact with each other as they nurture and heal me. In reflecting on this Call for Art, I began thinking about my personal guideposts—my four medicines—and flashed on an image from my childhood, sometimes called a “Fortune Teller.” It is a simple combinatorial machine, leading to surprising suggestions. I decided to make one, incorporating my photographs, my local knowledge, and my knowledge of sustainability and resilience. Ultimately, I made two fortune-tellers, one highlighting actions that heal and inspire me, and one prompting me to think about community actions leading to a sustainable future. I think of these as “four medicines toward healing” and “four medicines toward change.” The outer ring of each Fortune Teller identifies my four medicines—Water, Walking, Forests, Gardens. The next ring specifies directions, or portals, in relation to where I live--NE, SE, SW, NW. The inner ring contains prompts. Healing prompts begin with “Visit” or “Walk.” Action prompts begin with “Host,” “Grow,” “Plant,” or “Drink,” among others. By opening and closing the Fortune Teller I am prompted to engage one of my Four Medicines, to sustain myself and help envision a more resilient community.
©
2022
  • Kim Tanzer

Found drawing – after Duchamp

iPhone photos

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This is one of an irregular series of photos posted on my Instagram page, all titled “Found art after #Duhamp.” Artist Marcel Duchamp, inventor of the readymade, asked his audience to reconsider art, arguing that simply by calling something art—giving it a title, signing it, or placing it in an art context such as a gallery—it became art. Referring to the Alan Watts quote, “Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space,” each photo in this series invites the viewer to think of every moment we experience as part of an ongoing planetary performance. In this spirit, I hope that people who see these photos will come to recognize sunlight, shadows, stains, and the surfaces or forms that cast or capture shadows or cause reflections, as fragments of one ongoing artwork. In time, I hope others will post their own images demonstrating the mystery and beauty in which we are embedded, and some of my followers have done so. In this way, we are co-creating an online community of Earth-reverence. Loving our home is the first step to saving it.
©
2022
  • Kim Tanzer

Articles from the MAHB

Recovering the Walkabout

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