Making Meaning with the White Mountains

We are living in a time of profound social, ecological and technological change. Each day in the modern world, market-driven media, algorithms and now artificial intelligence are gradually diminishing our evolved capacities to sense, relate to, and make meaning with nature.

Extending Ecology: Making Meaning with the White Mountains is the latest outcome of an ongoing collaboration between an artist, an ecologist, and a forest in the White Mountains. The museum exhibition features visual and textual language that reflects the intelligence reactivated in the collaborators through long-term contemplative and creative immersion in the Hubbard Brook watershed. The project is an attempt to make the intelligence of nature, called Oika, palpable so that it may travel through interdisciplinary channels and back into culture.

In this panel discussion, Dr. Rich Blundell, Rita Leduc, and MWM curator Meghan Doherty delve into ways an experimental relationship between humans and a forest has served as a model for revitalized participation with the world, writ large.

Dr. Rich Blundell is an ecologist whose work explores the convergence of science, art, nature and culture. As the founder of Oika, his research examines how transformation happens across the scales of person, place and planet. As a communicator, Rich tells a scientific story of the universe that includes art and human creativity as natural phenomena. His goal is to make the continuity of nature palpable. Dr. Blundell has received numerous grants and awards including; the ongoing TIDES Innovators, The National Science Foundation grant for Science Out There, the Brinkman Award, The Deep Time Values award, The Macquarie University Innovation in Scholarship Award, an Oculus Creators Award and nomination for the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival Best New Media for Saving Grey’s Zebra. He is currently the Scientist-in-Residence at the Maria Mitchell Association on Nantucket Island.

Rita Leduc is an interdisciplinary artist who develops relationships with ecosystems through multisensory means. The understanding she gains from this approach informs endeavors on scales from environmental to societal. She is currently pursuing this work through several Oika projects; these include Extending Ecology as well as additional place-based collaborations, workshops, talks, and courses. Additional ongoing engagements include Creator/Director of the interdisciplinary GROUNDWORK retreat and member of The Place Collective, a UK-based creative research community. Leduc’s work has been shown, supported, published, presented, and workshopped widely, most recently at Stand4 Gallery (Brooklyn) and at Maria Mitchell Association (Nantucket). Leduc received her MFA from Mason Gross (Rutgers), Post-Bac Certificate from SAIC, and BA from the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches at Ramapo Collage and Rutgers University.

This is a hybrid event. To receive a Zoom link, please register HERE.