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.

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
Recovering the Walkabout

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