2023 Nature Now Environmental Film Festival featured artist
We are proud to feature Coastal Fragility - The Magic of Intertidal Zones and Beyond, by Dana Montlack. Dana's work explores the impact of climate change on Georgia’s coastline, incorporating cultural and scientific perspectives via aesthetically arresting images. Below is her description for the project.
"I collaborate with marine biologists, ecologists, and oceanographers at UGA, Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, and Georgia Southern University, among others, looking to marry their research methods and results with the imagery in the photographic texts I create. My emphasis is on capturing both the readily observable natural systems and those that are “invisible” to us, systems within which physical and natural processes great and small occur. I depend on the inherent capacity of visual art to impact viewers intellectually and emotionally, thereby encouraging greater awareness and appreciation of the ecological, historical, and cultural dynamics, as well as the dazzling diversity of the Georgia coastline.”
Pictured Above–Hannah Israel, Gallery Director of the Illges Gallery and Professor of Art at Columbus State University, and Pam Longobardi introduce Longobardi’s Drifters Project at our 2019 event.
Jaanika Peerna is an Estonian-born artist and educator living and working in New York since 1998. Her work encompasses drawing, installation, and performance, often dealing with the theme of transitions in light, air, water and other natural phenomena. For her performances she often involves the audience in participatory reflection on the current climate meltdown. Her art practice stems from the corporeal experience of our existence and reaches towards enhanced awareness of the fragility, interconnectedness and wonder of all life.
Celestia Morgan is an artist and educator currently living in Birmingham, Alabama. She received her MFA from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa in 2017, where she serves as an associate professor. Celestia Morgan works across several artistic mediums, incorporating sculpture, map-making and community engagement into her photography and video work to explore systemic racism through racial zoning practices and environmental injustice. With the appropriation of mapping and the mediating lens of photography, Redline explores the histories of racially-based housing discrimination exemplified in Birmingham, Alabama. The residue of redlining continues to haunt the city’s black neighborhoods as can be seen in the relationship between Interstate 20/59 and poverty-stricken areas.
Benjamin Dimmitt–Environmental Photographer
Benjamin Dimmitt photographs wetlands, forests and the landscape using film and a medium format camera. He uses his camera to investigate interdependence, competition, survival and mortality in the natural environment.
The University of Georgia Press will publish a book of Benjamin’s climate change project, An Unflinching Look, in fall 2023. In addition to his photography and writing, the publication will include contributions from distinguished photographer, Emmet Gowin; naturalist and activist, Susan Cerulean; research scientist and native Floridian, Dr. Matthew McCarthy; photography scholar and curator, Dr. Alison Nordström; and Alexa Dilworth, a native Floridian and publishing director at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies.
Benjamin was born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida. He graduated from Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, FL and also studied at the International Center of Photography in NYC, NY, Santa Fe Photographic Workshop in Santa Fe, NM, Santa Reparata Graphic Arts Centre in Florence, Italy and City and Guild Arts School in London, England.
He moved to New York City after college and held an adjunct professor position at the International Center of Photography from 2001-2013. He now lives and works near Asheville, NC. Recently, he has taught at Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, FL, Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC, Bascom Art Center in Highlands, NC and Dunedin Fine Art Center in Dunedin, FL.
Benjamin’s photographs have been exhibited at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, School of International Center of Photography, NYC, NY, American Academy of Arts & Letters, NYC, NY, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA, Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach FL, Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Tampa FL, Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA, Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC, Photo+Sphere Festival, Asheville, NC, Naiman Int’l Photography Festival, Mongolia, Southeast Center for Photography, Greenville, SC, Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, CA, Center for Fine Art Photography, Ft. Collins, CO, Davis Orton Gallery, Hudson, NY, Soho Photo Gallery, NYC, NY and Midtown Y Photography Gallery, NYC, NY.
His work is represented by Leslie Curran Gallery, St. Petersburg, FL and is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Eckerd College and numerous private collections. Ain’t Bad, Architectural Digest, Black & White, Colossal, Don't Take Pictures, Fraction, Lenscratch, Journal of Florida Studies, Orion, Oxford American, Photo District News, The New Yorker Photo Booth, What Will You Remember and many other publications have featured Benjamin’s photographs.
He was a finalist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 200 in 2014, 2017, 2018 and 2019 and in New Orleans Photo Alliance’s Clarence John Laughlin Award in 2014 and 2015.
His An Unflinching Look and Primitive Florida projects are available as traveling exhibitions.
Working as PlantBot Genetics, Jeff Schmuki and Wendy DesChene invent new ways to connect nature with our everyday lives. Their collaborative projects foster community discussion, understanding, and ideas for changing current environmental stresses, food shortages, and wasteful practices.
Wendy DesChene and American Jeff Schmuki began practicing together as an artist team in 2009. Both have extensive careers as solo artists in addition to their collaborative experience which has included a residency award at the American Academy in Rome and Monsantra, a traveling exhibition presented in six countries including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and the Goethe Institute in Cairo, Egypt. Currently, Wendy DesChene is an Associate professor at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama and Jeff Schmuki is Assistant Professor of Art at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia.
Wendy Walker
I draw to escape from words and the thoughts they ignite. I draw from life in order to understand parts of the world whose strangeness and complexity attracts me. At the moment I find myself "drawn" to the trees and people of the city. The musculature and gesture of the human figure is fully alive in trees. The New York subway may afford the greatest variety of faces to be found anywhere in the world. Drawing strangers in a public space is an exercise in speed, concentration, tact and empathy.
Cathy Fussell has been a practicing fiber artist for more than 50 years. She has been sewing and working with textiles since her early childhood in Buena Vista, Georgia, her hometown. Today, she maintains a studio in Columbus, Georgia, where she specializes in making art quilts and related works in fabric. Cathy’s imagery generally fall into three major categories: Regional Geography, Southern literature, and American modernism. Cathy Fussell retired from Columbus State University in 2011 following a long career as an English professor and teacher.
Fussell’s art is held in a number of public collections. Included among them are two major works in the The Fulton County (GA) Public Arts Collection and six large pieces in the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Koch Collection in New York, New York. Additional examples of her artwork has been exhibited in numerous juried and curated art exhibitions around the South and beyond, and her work is held in dozens of private collections around the nation and abroad.
In 2016, Cathy was commissioned by the prestigious Congressional Club in Washington, DC, to make a special quilt for First Lady Michelle Obama. The result was “Apollo Splashdown Revisited – Homage to Alma Woodsey Thomas.” That piece was presented to Mrs. Obama by The Congressional Club at their Annual First Lady’s Luncheon in Washington, DC, during the final year of the Obama presidency. That work will be included in the collection of the (forthcoming) Barack Obama Presidential Library in Chicago.
Pictured Above–Hannah Israel, Gallery Director of the Illges Gallery and Professor of Art at Columbus State University, and Pam Longobardi introduce Longobardi’s Drifters Project at our 2019 event.
The works of Durrell Smith (attending the festival in-person) are driven by a love for primitive and indigenous people, cultural appreciation for African-American history, and a passion for the great outdoors. His work becomes a dissection of the human psyche, a conversation with nature, and an observation of mark-making and line.
His creative process is active and instinctual; the works begin and conclude outdoors, allowing the elements to transmit spirit and vitality to each piece. Smith’s embedding of found objects as primal marks is indicative of its multi-cultural origins and connections. It is a critical part of Durrell’s work that they become a metaphor for the southern vernacular, passed down through the vessel of time, from his childhood growing up and creating in his grandfather’s backyard in historic Atlanta, Georgia.
Florence Neal
Florence Neal is an artist who makes prints, drawings and public art installations inspired by nature. Her prints and artist’s books can be found in major national and international collections.
A special interest within her work is the traditional Japanese water-based woodcut technique, known as Mokuhanga. She attended the first International Conference of Mokuhanga in Kyoto, Japan in 2011. Two years later, she was awarded a five-week residency for Advanced Study at MI-LAB (Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory) in Kawaguchiko, Japan to study with master printers. At the end of the residency, she hiked to the top of Mt. Fuji, a spiritual pilgrimage, still resonating within her work. In 2014, the Pollock Krasner Foundation awarded her a Fellowship for traditional printmaking and her innovative use of prints in public art installations.
Ms. Neal has exhibited at Jule Collins Smith Museum, Auburn AL; The Painters Gallery, Fleischmanns, NY; Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY; Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey; St. Joseph’s College, Brooklyn, NY; Dowling College, Oakdale, NY; Krakov Cultural Center, Prague, Czech Republic; University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL; Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA; University of Hawaii at Manao, Honolulu HI; and many others.
Her work is in the public collections of Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn NY; The Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA; Columbus Public Library, Columbus, GA; Hofstra University Museum, Hempstead, NY; Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn, AL; LaGrange Art Museum, LaGrange, Georgia; Memorial Sloan Kettering, Josie Robertson Surgery Center, New York NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; New York Public Library, Department of Prints, New York, NY; Omaha Public Library, Omaha, NB; and University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL.