The Columbia Daily Spectator, an independent student newspaper at Columbia, covered the Columbia Earth Institute/ Mana Contemporary "Actors from Witnesses" panel event in an article by Staff Writer Victoria Irizarry Sanabria. Below is an excerpt from the article.
April 12, 2021
By Victoria Irizarry Sanabria, Staff Writer
While Forman focuses on ice, artist Jeff Frost’s focus is on fire. He has spent five years studying wildfires and became a firefighter in order to capture images, time-lapses, and videos as these disasters occur. After witnessing 70 wildfires, Frost created “California On Fire,” a 25-minute film about the five stages of grief, presented through the destruction caused by wildfires and climate change. Regarding climate change, his wake-up call occurred five years ago when he witnessed a wildfire while driving and decided to create a timelapse of the event for as long as he could.
Together, these two artists will be displaying some of their artworks in the exhibition “Implied Scale: Confronting the Enormity of Climate Change,” which will be presented at Mana Contemporary from April 22 to July 22.
Unlike these two artists, Juang takes a more scientific approach to her art. Juang is a Ph.D. student in the department of earth and environmental sciences, based at the Tree Ring Lab at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Passionate about the intersection of art and science, she creates online drawings and comics about science and the importance of accessibility in STEM fields. She has always been interested in science, but climate change took a personal meaning as it snowed less and less each year in her Long Island home while growing up.
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“I feel like art has this twofold thing where, because it’s impacting humans on such a massive and terrible scale, art is there to help people who are experiencing climate change reflect on their own lives and their grief of how the Earth is changing. On the other side, it’s appreciating the beauty of nature that is being destroyed by climate change, and how we need to act on fixing that,” Juang said.
Read the full article on The Columbia Daily Spectator.