Angel Pleasant

Studio Art and Computer Science major

I make paintings, prints, and sculptures informed by our incredibly fraught historical moment, and my experience of the world, both as it currently exists as well as how it has existed in memory. I do this because I am fascinated with the natural world. This fascination inspires me to create art that reflects human interactions with the world. These actions have been constructive, destructive, or just plain naive. In creating art about the environment, I seek to bring attention to the disconnect between people and the only Earth we will ever have. The 1950s marked the beginning of the anthropocene, a new epoch of human-led climate change becoming the dominant force of change in our environment, and from then onward, we have continued the same processes that led us to this point. Why does change feel so impossible? Why have we separated ourselves from "nature"? We are nature. We are the natural world.

Dreaming of Mountains

acrylic on nylon, embroidery floss on linen

I had a dream I was a mountain, and the sky my blanket. In that dream, every night before I went to bed I'd look up and conjure the weather for the day. I controlled my wishes, but my thoughts were between the sky, the living things upon me, and myself. One sad thought: a cirrus. Two sad thoughts: a cirrostratus. A night of sad thoughts: a cumulonimbus. A cloud stacked so high it could tumble down onto me and I wouldn't know myself for days at a time.

I was apart from everything upon me. The clouds. The sky. The rocks. The mountains. My thoughts. We were separate because we were separately conscious, or so I thought.*

One day our creator fell ill. All the optimism, the clear blue skies, the wispy cirrus clouds, drained away from us. We woke everyday to a downpour, and suddenly we weren't so different. The boundaries between us dissolved like mountains to rock to sand to particles in the wind.

*I work in the limit of the artificial binaries between man/nature and art/craft, a boundary created to uphold oppressive structures of gender, colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. Oppressively arbitrary, they can and do shift constantly, positively or negatively favoring some. I seek to bridge these boundaries. Man is nature, craft is art. Any assertion to the contrary is based on the fear that a fundamental truth would upend the systematic oppressive hierarchies.

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