The Heat Is On exhibit at the Music, Art and Architecture (MAA) Library in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre features library collection materials that highlight creative responses to the ongoing climate crisis. The exhibit, which has been on display throughout the term and was set to align with Climate Action Week at UBC Library, will remain available to view until December 20.
“The materials selected for this exhibition are international in scope, and include architects, artists, musicians, planners, and scholars, as well as site-specific works and case studies from Brazil, Canada, Iceland, Japan, Nigeria, Ukraine and more,” says Sara Ellis, Art and Visual Literacy Librarian, who curated the exhibit in collaboration with David Haskins, Music Librarian, and Paula Farrar, Head of MAA Library.
We asked each librarian to tell us more about their favourite highlights from the exhibit.
Highlights from The Heat is On
Selections by Sara Ellis
Made in Fukushima reflects on environmental impacts resulting from an accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan in 2011. The pages of the book are made out of rice straw harvested from decontaminated fields, which was dried, cleaned, cut, and crafted into paper.
In Real Life is a catalogue from a retrospective exhibition of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson at Tate Modern, in London in 2019. The selected page shows work from The glacier melt series 1999/2019, in which Eliasson photographed several glaciers in Iceland in 1999 before returning to the same sites in 2019 to document the dramatic impact of global warming on the landscape.
Selections by David Haskins
slippages, by Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist Deborah Carruthers, was inspired by images of the Athabasca Glacier in recession. She visited the glacier to capture photographs, which inspired and informed her paintings. These were the basis of the graphic score that was created in collaboration with Dr. Jonathan Girard, who premiered the work with the UBC Symphony Orchestra in 2018.
John Luther Adams: Become Ocean
Become Ocean, for which John Luther Adams won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014, is the second part of a trilogy on environmental themes that includes Become River and Become Desert. Scored for a large orchestra divided spatially into three groups, the music evokes the inexorable swells of the rolling sea. This piece is a hauntingly beautiful depiction of our planet in which Adams reminds us that ‘as the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans…may quite literally become ocean.
Selections by Paula Farrar
Petrochemical America is a collaboration between photographer Richard Misrach and landscape architect Kate Orff that examines the industrialized landscape of the Mississippi River Corridor that stretches from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, known as Louisiana’s “Chemical Corridor.” Misrach’s photographs are partnered with Orff’s Ecological Atlas, a series of drawings or visual “throughlines” to unpack complex conversations around ecology, economy, extraction and transformation.
Resilient City: Landscape architecture for climate change
Resilient City addresses some of the challenges facing cities in the future. It presents measures and plans for eleven major cities in North and South America, which aim to protect inhabitants and their habitats against future storms, floods, landslides or drought. The featured page highlights The Climate Museum in New York City, the first American museum dedicated to the climate crisis.