This artist talk between Casey Deming, Torey Erin, and Regan Golden is about making art in, through, and with the natural world. It concluded the exhibition Viewfinder at MirrorLab in south Minneapolis.
It took place on a sunny Sunday afternoon, June 26th, 2022.
CASEY: Thanks for coming everybody. First off, I’d like to say thank you to the MirrorLab for hosting. This is a space that I used as a studio, as some of you may know, and I moved out last fall. Thank you to The State Arts Board for funding this project, and thanks to Torey and Regan for participating in this talk.
Briefly about the project: I was awarded a 2020 State Arts Board Grant. The project I conceived of and pitched was an investigation of publicly accessible landscapes here in the Twin Cities region. My aim was to examine how the act of picture taking and representation informs our attitude or behavior around how we manage land and how we think about our own gardens and what we do with regard to protecting land and obviously things about climate change. I was really interested in examining how we judge what we think of as a pretty landscape and how that is based on pictures and the history of seeing within landscape painting or photography. I came at it from someone who is not a trained photographer (the grant was also used, in part, to fund the purchase of a camera). I wanted to pull back from the subject matter and look at it slightly askew, trying not to focus on conventional or stereotypical pretty scenes, even though there are arguably some pretty pictures in the show. So that was my goal, and because of COVID I extended the grant as long as I possibly could. I ended up taking 1,800 pictures and this is the result of that aggressive edit down, but it’s obviously still a pretty dense show and I did that on purpose, where I wanted it to be “more is more” in a sense.
I’m really happy to share this space with Regan and Torey who make work in the realm of the natural world, landscape, ecology, and storytelling. I wanted to pitch up the show in relation to other people’s work in this field because I feel like it’s important to have a lot of different angles looking at this kind of subject matter, especially not just a white man’s interpretation of it.
Maybe if you two want to just give brief introductions about your general practice and what inspires you to make work using nature, and you can also talk about the work that you’ve brought with you, which we invite everyone to take a look at.
REGAN: I’m Regan Golden. I know a lot of you. Thank you for coming, and thank you Casey for inviting me, and thanks Torey for being here. It’s so exciting to be on the stage with you all. I am an artist who mostly works with the plants in my own backyard, not far away places, not vast wildernesses, but the plants in my backyard and the plants that grow along the intersection of 280 and 94 along this area called Kasota Ponds which is this wetland that drains down into the Mississippi River. It’s actually right at the center of the city, it’s right in between Minneapolis and St. Paul. It’s full of invasive plants, nasty things, plastics, tires, all kinds of stuff. I became interested in the wildness of this space, this idea of it not being wilderness but it being totally wild and run crazy. I became obsessed with it, and it was also what I could photograph. I had been previously traveling to far-flung places to photograph beautiful wildernesses and amazingly incredible plants, rare plants, and I couldn’t do that anymore. I had two kids at home, and I decided I would just look at what was around me, and that has kept me fascinated for five years. And I teach, I’m an assistant professor in fine arts at MCAD.
TOREY: Thank you for sharing, and it was very visual to think about your scales, how you went from here to here, which is a nice connection.
REGAN: Well, and COVID brought that even closer. Those far-flung places were no longer an option, your backyard was what you had.
TOREY: There’s so much there. My name is Torey Erin, and I am a multi-disciplinary artist. I work in film, sculpture, installation, and I am currently studying landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota, where I am looking at how we relate to our ecology on some larger and smaller scales. I feel like I went into landscape architecture thinking about how we can make impact on our coasts as our sea levels are rising, but the more that I learn the more localized I am getting, which is an expansion of how we think about our relationship to place and our relationship to time and expanding that sort of mindset. Some of the work that I brought with me today is a zine called Salix which was projected here at MirrorLab, thanks to John [Marks]. It was a 16MM film projected onto the windows and it started thinking about what our lives would be like if we lost the willow tree and then going from there. So thinking about the cultural memory, the biology, the medicinal properties. There are recipes for tea or how to make charcoal, poems, meditations, so it was focused on this portrait along with the film. I also brought an Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden zine which is about Eloise Butler. If you haven’t been to the wildflower garden, it’s in north Minneapolis and it’s the best place in Minneapolis. It’s completely natural. Basically, as the parks department was developing Theodore Wirth Park in the early 1900s, she was a high school botany teacher and wanted to section off that land. She was taking students to study all the plants there, she protested for several years, and the parks department finally gave her that section of land. She did bring in some ornamentals because that was in fashion at the time, but natural gardens weren’t part of America, there were one or two natural gardens in North America, so having this native species or indigenous planting wasn’t part of American landscape architecture at the time. In the zine, I’m looking at her practice as something we can, 120 years later, look at as we develop our cities and think about the world.
CASEY: I think that’s important because both of you have writing practices, which I really appreciate. I almost wonder if the subject matter of landscape calls for people to contextualize their work and try to frame it within this larger world, whether it be climate or whatever local issues we are dealing with. Not to say that the work shouldn’t always speak for itself, but I’m interested in how with your (Torey) Eloise Butler zine, the rich historical background of all of that, but with Salix you’re mixing it with folktale and storytelling too. I’m interested in how you put both of those worlds up next to each other and then present your own kind of artistic interpretation as well.
And for you (Regan), there’s also a lot of personal storytelling, your role as a mother, balancing work … it’s a really interesting way of melding different subjective takes on your subject matter. If you could both respond to why you choose that historical, knowledge-based approach while highlighting this indigenous or folktale take on it as well.
TOREY: I think as artists we naturally gravitate towards the unseen or the mystery of the world, but I also think science is a very important part of our world as well, you can’t unsee it. One of the things I have been thinking about the last couple of years while developing these projects is how do we relate in a way where we can see both the science and the history but also expand this relationship to the natural world that is about the invisible or about the stories that are felt and not necessarily described with fact, whether it be bringing empathy or emotion or feeling or however you like to describe that. Indigenous people have been doing this for thousands of years, it’s not a new concept. There’s a different relationship that has been created with the land. Looking at Robin Wall Kimmer’s writing or Tiokasin Ghosthorse describing that we are in reciprocity, that a tree isn’t an object, it’s actually a part of us and we’re a part of it. We’re sort of peeling away the layers of Western civilization, science included, to appreciate the mystery and dissolve the object/subject.
REGAN: That’s the same way I use writing. The zine I brought with me today, it has the names of the plants that I researched in many different languages including Dakokta, since we are on Dakota land, and Anishinaabe, French, English, thinking about all the people that have had a relationship to the Mississippi River, particularly, I photograph the plants along Owámniyomni, which is also known as St. Anthony Falls. I was really interested in what language tells us about who has been in this place and how we have a relationship not only with the landscape itself, but the history of all of the people who have lived here and called it home. I think that for me, writing is about that establishing of relationships, and research as a way of extending those tendrils into the world to better understand relationships, not only between people and plants or the history of the city and the river, but also understand my own positionality within this landscape and as a photographer too. I’m trying to figure out as I am taking pictures, what is the mindset, what is my position, what position of privilege, a position of distance if I am looking through a viewfinder, how am I framing the landscape, how am I in relationship with the landscape while I am taking a picture. The writing is just a way of slowing down that whole process and unpacking all of those moments along the way.
CASEY: I think that allows us to expand on what devices you two choose to use, whether it’s something more conceptual, experience based, event based, or ethereal like film. I’d say it’s not always as tangible in your (Torey) work, that you are playing around with things that are more ethereal or ephemeral. And I really appreciate your (Regan) mixed media use of your plant-heavy content. It’s using both the richness of the natural world behind your house but your synthesizing it with a scanner, your mixing it with your own drawings, it’s a nice play of media scale that’s pushing up against the content. Maybe we can talk briefly about what tools we choose to use and why.
TOREY: I started as a painter, I was very much a painter, I was like, “I’m going to have a studio, I am going to be a painter, I am only using paint forever and ever until I die.” I wanted to be like Susan Rothenberg in the desert with my paint. But I think I saw that this is another box, this is another box that we put ourselves into as artists, and it can be great for some people, but the natural way I approach thinking or being in the world is how do I break this rule or how do I bend or dissolve this thing. It really depends on the type of message that I am trying to communicate and the medium sort of follows after that. Most recently, I made a garden using love letters: I made seed paper out of perennial seeds, and then we, a group of people and I, wrote love letters to the Earth and we talked about our grief and our connection with the planet and how we experience nature or a connection to nature at maybe a very young age. We wrote about what we were afraid of with climate change, and this was an uncomfortable space for a lot of people to talk about feelings and emotions – we were in Fargo, North Dakota, by the way – but people did it, people were really willing to participate, and then we planted this garden and it will grow over time, probably not this year but in the next couple of years. I wanted to make something that was helpful. In the last couple of years, especially with Trump going back on the EPA, getting out of the Paris Agreement, and then Biden having to undo all the damage and we are still in this damaged place, feeling really hopeless, just wanting to make something like a revival of connection to each other and the Earth, and the medium followed after that. With writing, it’s always supplemental, or it has been supplemental, and then there’s an ephemeral quality or an object that comes after that.
CASEY: I think I have the crux of starting with the medium and forcing the message, I’m still working on that. Briefly before Regan talks about her tools too, I am primarily a printmaker, so these prints with the borders are what I am most versed in, the CMYK photographic printmaking. So I have that in this show and the book has some of that in it too. I have worked with a lot more found and archival imagery, so this is my first foray in my own image making, and not really knowing how to use a camera and figuring that out as I go. So that was me forcing myself into a different medium to convey this message, mostly because I wanted to collect so much content that I couldn’t feasibly print it all and I didn’t want to use found imagery because the show is about reframing the way you look at landscape, so you don’t know if you can find that imagery.
TOREY: [gesturing behind] I love seeing this termite pattern on the tree, I see Casey the printmaker, this nice, beautiful woodcut, this first woodcut, probably, or like this inky tree trunk. I love seeing artists work with other mediums because you can see traces of how they’ve seen the world or how they’ve communicated as they explore different mediums.
REGAN: [gesturing across the room] That one reminds me of an etching or a lithograph, the composition and the materials in it feels very much in the vein of printmaking. For me, I think of myself, weirdly, as a philosopher, and that my artwork is a way either of exploring or embodying that philosophy or perspective or testing out different theories in how they play out in the world through image making and through collage. I use whatever material gets to my ideas, but at the same time I would say that my interest in philosophy is always balanced by an intense love of materials. If you have seen my work before, there’s stuff everyone, paint, sticky things, and dirt, it’s a mashup of all sorts of different things. In that, I hope and want people to feel that love of being in the world, but it’s also a way of exploring a philosophy of phenomenology and that idea of being in the world, as written about by people like Hegel and Heidegger and many others. It’s a way to use my art practice as a way to test other people’s philosophies against my own through the materials.
CASEY: If you want to talk a little bit about your Prairie Constructs project. The thing I remember reading as I was diving into that was the seasonality of your working on it, how you were embodying the subject matter with the way you tackle it through your tools or your image-making time schedules. I think it’s great that you are taking the subject matter into the act of image making.
REGAN: I have three different series that I work on: I have ephemerals which are spring and fall, prairie constructs which is summer, and the thaw series which is winter. For the last four years, I have basically just rotated working on those throughout each year and that’s really a response to my garden changing and the landscape around me changing and being responsive to that. It also came out desperation, the winters being so long in the garden, and the green being missing for so long, I had to look around and try to find beauty in ice and patterns, all the different things in winter, all the different details that come out in the landscape that you don’t notice when it’s full and green and lush, and there’s bright, beautiful purples and things like that which eye goes right to and you’re completely distracted by, or the little pink morning glory across the way. We’re so entranced by those, and then in winter we are left wondering what is there to look at and process and enjoy. It took me a little longer to realize that there was so much there to uncover. I did my second ice rink this year, we have a big ice rink in our backyard that we skate on, so I decided that there’s a giant blank canvas, so I just embedded photographs in the rink and paint and collage pieces and cyanotypes and poured water over the top, sealing the rink so we could skate over the collages. So we are not just taking things out of the landscape into the studio and working with them, but how I can meet the landscape halfway when it is 10 below zero, use the ice to be your medium. That was the second year I’ve done that, and that was a response to working with what’s there.
CASEY: I remember reading in the essay that you wrote about collage as a way of life, especially during the pandemic, if you are parent and you have a job and you’re managing or juggling a lot of things. If you are trying to be a parent, a worker, an artist, how can that chaos live in your work too, you just accept the role that you can’t keep those worlds separate?
REGAN: For me, my work has been slowing about coming to terms with that and embracing it. Philosophy can’t be separated from changing diapers, those things have to all go together in order to develop a way of being and existing in the world that is not a singular exercise.
CASEY: It’s like that quote about first Nirvana and then the laundry.
REGAN: There’s something to be learned in that act of caring which is a much bigger conversation. Caring for the garden, caring for the landscape, caring for the children, caring for the birds. That extension of care is part of my work as well and honing that through the artwork is important to me. I see a lot of care in these images as well, and attention, and cultivating that sense of attention is something that photography does in a really unique way.
CASEY: The other things I wanted to speak about with your work, Torey, is the meditative and spiritual, the kind of healing power of nature. I think your projects play with that in a really great way, like the impermanence field experience projects that you did. Like a tender invitation, the idea of tenderness and tending being so closely related. As a personal aside, I broke my wrist like five or seven years ago and after I had surgery my brother watched me as I was recovering from the drugs and I went out on his deck and laid under this massive oak tree and zoned in and out of sleep, and it was the most healing thing I could have done. I feel like your work embodies that kind of experience and you want to find ways to bottle it up and share it, but not always in material modes. I don’t know if you have more to say on that or if you have future plans to keep expanding on that.
TOREY: Thank you, that was really beautiful, maybe I’ll use that for future grant projects.
CASEY: Feel free!
TOREY: Thank you. Yes, tending, tenderness. There’s a large part of capitalism or Western civilization that likes to separate ourselves from our own bodies and from nature and the fact that we are nature, and being in embodied state, or some people call it a meditation, just feeling yourself with space inside of you without anxiety, without fear, without thinking about the future or the past, that is a revolutionary act in America. I am constantly trying to get back to that place myself, how I am completely embodied, how am I not participating in this buying or being sold something or being pushed onto or constrained or confined, that’s what I’m trying to get at with my work. Sometimes with my films I’ll take a long walk, sometimes I’ll film something if I am feeling completely embodied and wanting to share that experience with someone else, or what it felt like. But sometimes I won’t even bring out the camera, I’ll have it with me, and that feels like a protest or something. Or like trying to show that there is magic everywhere, and I think that your photography is getting there too, or it is there. Where you are photographing these landscapes that maybe people would call too wild, or decayed, or dead, or forgotten, when they are incredibly beautiful. The way that landscape and the way that society has framed our lens to think about landscape as the pristine grass space, tree here, tree here, daisies here, so I think that you’re unraveling that too and I have a great appreciation for that attention to detail, like the beauty that a tree coming through the fence and just fighting back or what it might look like if we are not here because nature will go on entirely without us. Rewilding is really important and I think you’re getting there too. And Regan your work is there too, there is this rewilding or anti-pristine way of looking at landscape.
CASEY: You’re brought up a thing earlier about resisting the use of your camera, part of this project – and I think every artist probably struggles with this – this urgency to turn everything into a project. You can’t stop the flood of ideas. It’s hard to have a calm mind, and I think there is something specific about landscape or nature that really triggers it even more and maybe it’s a product of capitalism, the image making or the history we all have, the prevalence of images in our lives. You can even see the way people contort their bodies to see something in the landscape, it’s almost as if they are trying to frame it as if it’s a picture even if they are not taking a picture. I had this great conversation with a friend of mine who does naturalistic landscape painting based off of photos he takes. They are subtle and quiet photos, and he had this photo of a person taking a picture of the sunset with their cell phone and he wanted to turn it into a painting but he felt it was too commentary or too topical. We talked about how it’s easy to judge people as they look at the world through their phones without really looking at it through their eyes. We were talking about having a certain kind of sympathy for the viewer, in that we are all just bombarded with this way of looking at life and we can’t judge each other for it. If someone wants to take a picture of the sunset with their phone, that’s great, that’s fine. There’s an image in my book (Wayfinder) that has a picture with a woman with a sunshade in the rose garden, a staged scene, someone was doing a photoshoot, and even that feels a little too critical or that I’m trying to make some kind of comment. What do you all think about this project-making urge that’s hard to push aside sometimes?
REGAN: I have a lot of thoughts on that topic, but I came to photographing landscapes when the woods behind my grandmother’s house were being dynamited and I had a chance to photograph it before it was blown up. My family’s response to this was, “Oh, it’s OK if the forest is dynamited because we’ve got the pictures that Regan took.” [laughing] Oh OK, cool, we’re good. So the forest was blown up and I have thousands of images of it, but obviously there’s nothing of that forest in the actual images, I mean nothing! It’s like looking at a ghost whisper of what that forest was, it’s nothing like the thing itself. That initial experience has forever thrown me into a crisis when it comes to photographing the landscape. I really don’t know how to do it at all in a way that shows the tenuousness of every landscape that we basically live with right now. While every forest in the world is not facing imminent explosion, everything is changing and everything is basically on the brink. So I don’t know how to take pictures of a landscape, and hence collage has been my response because collage feels like it’s more representative of the tenuousness and fragility of the landscape. I trained with Craig Blacklock, who is a famous landscape photographer of northern Minnesota. After his wife passed away, he created a fellowship through the Jerome Foundation to support landscape photographers. I went up to his land for two weeks and learned how he works as a photographer, which is basically that you put your camera and you find the plant you want to photograph and then you wait, and wait for the light to be perfect, you wait for that moment and then you capture it. That’s a very different experience. When I walk around Eloise Butler I’m photographing everything. I'm not sitting in front of that one plant to wait for the light to be absolutely perfect, but maybe I should. Maybe that’s a better way of approaching landscape photography, I guess I’m still kind of questioning this. Also the camera itself with the way it prizes Cartesian perspective through the very framing of the viewfinder is, in and of itself, a detachment from the landscape that ruptures that sense of embodiment that you experience when you are just walking through the landscape. Those are the kinds of things that make me crazy. I still have thousands and thousands of landscape photographs on my harddrive filling the whole thing! I can’t stop, but I don’t really know how to do it.
CASEY: How do you fit such a subject on a medium? It’s impossible.
REGAN: But there’s that desire to try, to preserve it, protect it, and catch that moment when the light is just right, to capture that feeling of that space, it’s compulsive.
CASEY: But maybe it’s more important to capture it when it doesn’t look that good, when the light’s not great. You talk about that in your practice, the balance of what poor craft can do. It could be a strong image but the craft of the image could be poor and that’s fine, it’s still doing the job.
REGAN: In some ways, if the poor craft, if the sloppiness of the image, or the messiness or grittiness of the image reminds you that your feet are in the dirt as you’re taking the picture, then in some sense it’s done its job.
TOREY: This is just bringing to mind our American landscapes and where they come from was very medium heavy. Landscape painting informed landscape architecture in England, and then landscape architecture in England came to the United States and then it sort of framed the way that we look at the world. It’s interesting to think how painting informed our reality and our theater and we are also capturing that theater in our phones. A moment in which I love is the sharing of the photo of the sunset with someone you adore. That is a beautiful experience. I think that’s what people are trying to do, they’re trying to connect. That’s the bottom line of our humanness is that we want to connect.
CASEY: I really love this artist David Horvitz who did this great project where he had family members or friends who took a video of the sun setting on each coast, I think it was even on the same day, and then he projected them on two cell phones right next to each other. He has a unique way of playing around with that universality of nature in such subtle and playful modes. I recommend looking it up. He’s dealing with these tropes that exist but tweaking them in such a way that adds a connective nuance to it.
Maybe we should open it up to questions, if anybody here wants to share anything.
[comment from John Marks in the audience. John is an artist working out of MirrorLab and he helped Casey put on this show]: I will say that I think a lot of what I just heard, you’re talking about in many ways the decolonization of beauty. You said the word “pretty” around ten times in the first five sentences you said today. We’ve all talked about it, and the way we are sort of ordering beauty in our minds is actually a fact of colonialism. We need to decolonize our ideas around beauty. Dave Horovitz, in his piece “Nobody Owns the Beach,” he’s talking about Malibu, that’s where he grew up. People want to take that beach, it’s worth a lot of money. But nobody owns the beach, nobody owns the beauty. We can’t order the beauty. That termite tree, that’s beautiful, someone can’t say that’s ugly. We need to separate ourselves from the idea that that’s ugly. I think that’s what you are doing with a lot of this work. You’re being present with the landscape, not objectifying it, being totally present with it in the way that it is. Like Torey was saying, this is a landscape, that’s not a tree, that’s our environment.
TOREY: It's not even our environment, it’s more than that, it’s us. Someone recently said, talking about climate change, we’re cutting off our own limb. We are literally doing that while we are cutting our forests or putting our turf lawn, all of these things. That’s speaking to the interconnectedness that science is now starting to prove, that Eastern philosophy has been talking about for thousands of years. We are absolutely a part of it. We forget that. I don’t wake up and think, “wow, I’m an animal,” but I’m trying to get there!
CASEY: Yeah, we would not exist without flowering plants.
JOHN: You wake up in the morning and say, “how am I going to operate in Capitalism today?” because that’s what I have to do.
TOREY: Totally, like what is on my to-do list. I started – I’m just sharing this as a practice or an experiment, it’s really opened up some spaces for me –I have a calendar, people maybe have a digital calendar, I have a physical, analog one. I am a to-do list person, I’m a little type A but also a little messy and sloppy. I started to include these little anecdotes on my to-do list, like “break time open,” but not like break time for lunch, but “break time open.” Try to get outside of what time is, minute to minute, and then see what happens. I’ve actually had a couple of moments in the past month in my calendar, I was like, holy shit! I totally broke time open, I forgot what time it was, what day it was, I didn’t have any sort of that to-do list brain or that cycle of the hamster wheel in my mind, which is so hard to do.
CASEY: Especially if you have a big project you’re trying to finish. [laughter]
TOREY: Like a State Arts Board grant and they want you to jump through all of the hoops, it’s really hard to do.
CASEY: Or if you are a parent, you have to make the most of every hour.
REGAN: I do feel like in many ways that having young children, it has broken me out of some of that kind of structure of life, well, tremendously. I spend more time trying to recoup a little bit of that and have otherwise kind of given up on that structure, especially during the summer when they’re both always home with me. I think after having children, it really made me feel more like I understood the physicality of the world and I wanted to communicate that more through my work. Before I came here, I was getting the chocolate off my son’s face and I did that classic lick your finger and get the chocolate because he was going to a birthday party. Those moments make you feel like, oh yeah I am totally a part of nature, a part of the animal world, you can’t escape it in those moments. So there’s that sense of caring for the natural world that I feel like I want in my work, but there’s also a sense of desperation and sometimes sadness, or a sense of urgency, or a sense of things slipping away. Every time I make a picture of the natural world, it’s disappearing, something’s escaping, something’s missing, something’s falling out, something’s evaporating, something’s leaving. That is very hard to experience as a parent and as an artist in those moments.
CASEY: I had a lot of stress and anxiety about wrapping this project up because I had to basically build a new studio in my house. But this whole time I kept trying to dislodge myself by saying, “I’m stressed about the most privileged things, I’m trying to finish a grant project and build a studio in my own house.” It’s so dumb, but it’s hard to get outside of it. The irony of wrapping this project up, just to be transparent, I neglected all the things that the project is about, like going for walks or weeding my garden. It goes back to trying to turn things into projects, whether or not you are an artist that can manage your time and execute things. I talked to John’s partner Crystal Myslajek about the idea of grants and the way they’re structured in such a sense that you are pitching this idea but you have to execute it a year later, and all of your ideas are different about it and you’ve lost your motivation.
REGAN: And the world is different.
CASEY: I’m totally indebted and love The State Arts Board, I’m not being critical of that process by any means. The granting system in this state, as great as it is, can be a real anchor that can weigh you down when you’re in it.
TOREY: There’s not a ton of room to explore or navigate the way that I think artists are naturally inclined to do and follow those rabbit holes. I think every artist that I have spoken to about grant systems, and I used to kind of function or operate grants at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and it’s the same conversation that we are all having internally but there’s no way to communicate this, but maybe this year.
CASEY: Yeah, we can share the audio [or this transcript!] from the talk. [laughter]
JOHN: They know that they are structurally flawed.
CASEY: The people that work there are amazing and super suppurative and have definitely bent over backwards to accommodate artists during COVID. I’m not critiquing the people. We are super lucky to live in a state like Minnesota that has this amount of funding that goes to artists. Even if there are structural problems, again, what do you do with all of the ideas you want to turn into something? I have this problem of containing all of my interests. I feel like I am pouring this liquid into all of these ill-formed cups that are not the right size of shape and I feel like I am spilling forth all of the time. I think that’s a product of capitalism, where you need to make sure you remember this. I mean, I take really extensive notes when I read novels! I can’t turn it off. Maybe for some artists it’s a curse that you have to carry with you.
REGAN: The book project that I did, which was also funded by The State Arts Board, thank you, was photographing plants that are along the Mississippi River, mostly in the areas that are embedded in concrete. They might be growing in the cracks. They are kind of rewilding a landscape that is very carefully controlled. I think on a more positive note, those plants show tremendous resilience. Think about how much concrete there is around St. Anthony Falls, everything is concrete, both sides, and it’s been that way for as long as I can remember that landscape. And yet, all of these different plants, the jewelweed, the mullen, everything that is growing in those little cracks, over time it will bust out that concrete, you know it’s going to happen. Plants have so much resilience and remarkable ingenuity and I really feel like our future depends on it, to be honest.
CASEY: Plant resiliency seems like a good note to end on. Thank you everyone.