Artwork
Digitized and manipulated stereoscopic photographs
There is no hope - but we might be wrong.
The images in VENT represent the beauty and terror of our world at a time when our knowledge of the impacts of climate change pose serious questions about our future. The steady drumbeat of news - wildfires and floods, species loss and coral die-offs, the explosive ferocity of storms and a string of “hottest years on record” - is the reality that terrorizes futurity.
Humans have faced dark days throughout history, but this is the first time the threat is so elemental to the support systems that sustain life, it requires a response that changes nearly everything we do. The only adequate course of action is to re-imagine how we live on the planet, and to create change at a faster pace than we are used to. It’s as if elephants evolved to stop growing tusks in a generation or two in response to being hunted for ivory.
One should expect that the certainty of a radically altered future will be reflected in art and culture. How will this predicament be recognized and represented? A million years from now today’s artists could be “cave painters” to be deciphered by archaeologists from another planet. Will art help foster change, or express a more personal emotional alarm?
The great variety of human cultures and the collective knowledge of our experience on the planet will be critical to our ability to resist the predictable. Art can help us vent how we feel about it.
Peter Bahouth spent 30 years as a trained irritant and advocate for climate change and other environmental issues as the Executive Director of Greenpeace USA, The Ted Turner Family Foundation, and The US Climate Action Network. A self-taught photographer, Bahouth’s primary medium is stereoscopic (3D) photography, a process developed in the 1830s. Bahouth designs his own devices with lenses necessary to create a stereoscopic (3D) effect, that require the active choice and participation of the person viewing the image. Looking into the viewing device removes all other external visual information. By totally isolating the visual experience there is a sense of being projected into another place and time. Bahouth’s work has been shown at venues including: The Flow Art Fair in Miami (2006), Pulse Art Fair (2007), Marcia Wood Gallery (2007), USF Museum of Contemporary Art (2007), Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia (2009), Hagedorn Gallery (2013 + 2014), The Zuckerman Museum of Art (2015), Swan Coach House (2016), Steven Smith Fine Art (2016) and the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.