Robin Vuchnich: In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers—The Memory of a Season
Exploring such issues as climate change, rising sea levels, and environmental stewardship, Robin Vuchnich creates immersive, light-based installations as meditations on the vulnerability of nature. Through projection mapping, video art, and creative coding, the Clarksville-based artist brings scientific data about the changing world to beautiful and vivid life.
This exhibition pays tribute to nineteenth-century naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who collected numerous species of native plants as he explored the countryside around Concord, Massachusetts, the site of Walden Pond. Today, much of his collection, dried and pressed, is housed in the Harvard University Herbaria.
Of Thoreau’s 648 plant specimens preserved at Harvard, over half are now extinct or endangered in the Concord region because of climate change, pollution, overdevelopment, and other human causes. This tragic loss of biodiversity inspired ecologist and entomologist Emily Meineke to convene artists and scientists to create an exhibition reflecting on this erasure of once-abundant flora. In addition to Vuchnich, participants included artist and professor of photography Leah Sobsey, film studies professor Marsha Gordon, and professor of organismic and evolutionary biology Charles Davis.
For her part, Vuchnich created the two video projections on view here, This is and No Mistake
and The Memory of a Season, which vividly illustrate the diminishment of plant species around Walden Pond since Thoreau’s time. She hopes that the videos will encourage us to walk through the landscape wherever we live and enjoy nature’s beauty while remembering what has been lost and feeling responsible to preserve what remains.
