...Rice University 2010
Our culture recognizes the fragility of natural areas. Greatly reduced in scale by development and managed by humans, these protected landscapes have become "museums" dedicated to what is significant, valuable, and beneficial. Rice University has preserved it’s natural landscape similarly by taking great care to preserve the magnificent trees and parklands on its campus. More recently, the university created a GPS system that identifies every tree on campus. From the beginning of this project, I conceptualized the Rice University campus as a Tree Museum. The four photographs titled, paraMuseum, are images of leaves from four indigenous oak trees found on the Rice University campus. They reflect my interest in how humans actively create and measure experience, perception, meaning and the fate of our natural environment. The installation that opened in November 2010 will be followed by an interdisciplinary conference on the environment that I will chair in 2011. The conference recognizes the importance of a paradigm shift in the conversation of environmentalism in the academic and intellectual systems of our country and focuses on generating a dynamic atmosphere of risk taking, activism, and adaptive thinking.
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