Guest artist Leah Beeferman personally showcased DePauw’s first exhibition of this school year at the Peeler Art Center on Aug. 26. entitled “Cloud Scale Uncertainties,” Beeferman explained the relationship between climate change and our personal, national, global and planetary aspects with her six pieces of art.
Traveling all the way from Providence, Rhode Island in order to set up her exhibition, this is the first time Beeferman gets to view her work together on walls.
In choosing the title of her artwork, she combines how weather and uncertainty prove to have a deeper meaning within our everyday lives. “It’s something we all have to live with,” Beeferman says. By using science and her own experience with weather, she portrays a more structured view of the world.
Working with landscapes in her art allows her to demonstrate the small scale changes that occur every day around the globe. “Weather becomes this kind of defining thing that is just constantly changing… We have some idea what the weather is probably going to be like next week, but there is uncertainty in that,” Beeferman notes.
There are six different pieces and series of art within the showcase that she explains in her talk, all unique while still breaching the subject of climate change and the ambiguity it brings.
The first series she introduces is titled, “Weather of the Weather,” consisting of four 3D rendered shapes that she made herself and a collection of satellite images and weather maps from the internet. One of her main interests that she notes within this series is how 4D phenomena from satellites are transferred into 2D images. A theme of this series includes the effect that humans have on the Earth, despite its large surface, which opposes how the larger phenomena recorded were formed into smaller images.
The next series contains 15 laser etched images on sheets of aluminum with graphite. Beeferman visited a forest research station in southern Finland for two weeks, which focused on exchange of greenhouse gasses between plants and the atmosphere. Every day this station would release graphs about these exchanges, to which the artist took these online and inspired this series.
She then stripped the graphs of all their written information and mixed them together to make these pieces. Beeferman did this in order to “represent this tension between what we can know and what we can’t know.”
Moving on, she presents “Three Weathers,” which comprises five posters depicting the weather wherever she was during that moment of time. She, along with friends, worked together to collect satellite images and short descriptions of the weather as they were experiencing it. The purpose of this series was to, “memorialize these passing moments.” There are 53 in total that she has made which proposes the idea of continuous time and pulling isolated moments out of it.
The fourth work that she presents is a large, translucent sheet with printed images that Beeferman photographed at a cloud observatory in Barbados in May. Right on the coast, she got to observe trade winds, which is important because they form a large percentage of clouds throughout the world, and therefore are one of the least understood cloud systems.
Along with this, she collected some of the data that was presented from the observatory and used that in her piece as well. This piece is the largest showcased, and its purpose is to, “get you to think about your body’s relationship to all of these elements.”
The next work is titled, “These Moments of Transfer” which includes a video on a projector that shows layered footage of different ecosystems. This refers to the transfer of greenhouse gasses and other material between the atmosphere, but also leaves room for interpretation. In addition to the footage she shot, there is sound in the background due to her equipment, which seems to be a hum. Beeferman notes this sound is a bit “unsettling” and she relates that to what we are dealing with currently in our environment.
The final series is titled, “Deserts and Forests” which encapsulates five different collages of photographed landscapes in Finland, New Mexico, and Ecuador. Her goal is to maintain the qualities of these landscapes, but allow them to become something else entirely. Evolution is a main theme within this series, as environments change constantly. “It’s not possible to represent a landscape at all, certainly not in one picture, at one moment,” Beeferman says.
The exhibition will continue until Oct. 13, where students can stop by and contemplate the deeper meaning of Beeferman’s work within its uncertainties.