Guest artist speakers share wisdom: Supermrin, Rob Reynolds, and Joshua Dawson
We were honored to have artists Supermrin, Rob Reynolds, and Joshua Ashish Dawson join us earlier this month for an artist panel to share their climate artwork with the 2025 cohort of Climate Storytellers.
Supermrin
“I'm interested in working with artists, architects and makers of all kinds, and we reuse plastic bottles donated from local grocery stores to make molds that eventually make complex artworks like this one, and using compost materials to transform matter into a spiritual seeking, or a question.”
“I work with scientists, and at the same time, I don't think of myself as a communicator for scientists. I believe that art is a way to knowledge - a way of thinking and being with inherent tools that are not the scientific process, but parallel, equal to, or sometimes even more truthful than scientific practice. A lot of the issues of climate science today come from an enlightenment era relationship with knowledge where we believe that everything can be understood, or everything can be owned and controlled.
And I think that ultimately art blossoms and blooms in ways that science cannot even come close to.”
-Supermrin
Quotes from their artist talk on 4/2/25 to Cohort 2 of the Climate Storytelling 2075 program.
Supermrin is an Indian artist working at the intersections of sculpture, and ecology. Her bioart project “FIELD” employs the widespread use of engineered lawn grasses as an operative metaphor for a capitalist, colonial mindset that has led to ecological collapse.“FIELD” has been featured in Lund Humphries’ recent publication, “Towards Another Architecture: New Visions for the 21st Century”, edited by Owen Hopkins, a critical rethinking of Le Corbusier’s legacy in the global south in the face of climate change.
Supermrin’s work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe, and Asia, at venues including the San Francisco Art Commissions Galleries; Cheateau de Vaudijon, Colomber, Switzerland; the Italian Virtual Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for Architecture 2021; Untitled Art Fair, Miami; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; Governors Island, NYC; Tactile Bosch, Wales, and others. Her recent exhibition “Rodin Response: FIELD family secrets”, curated by Dr. Peter Bell at the Cincinnati Art Museum, OH is an artistic reply to the legacy of sculptor Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917), and the fragmented histories of colonialism and modernism of his era. Her two-person exhibition “Aliens: Colonial Narratives Through Plant Migration and Bio-Art” curated by Isabella Indolfi at PS122 Gallery, NYC explore the politics of land and nature through the language of plants.
Rob Reynolds
"How do we let our artistic intuitions be transformed by these awarenesses [of climate change], and then how do we begin to play with scale? A little nugget of wisdom that I've gleaned from Bill Mckibben's writings: he feels that art and artists can register scale, and through stories and through narratives and through interventions, can help us begin to understand what's happening."
“How might we de-center the human and why might we want to?
How might we, in our practices, work away from the fantasy of humankind as separate from the natural world - a condition of the Enlightenment that has really not worked out so well for us?
If we think for instance about the enduring popularity of the German Romantic period painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich: this is a human figure that we see from behind, separate from the natural world, as if to be overwhelmed by limitless abundance and yet also, perhaps, the master of all he surveys, with all that implies.
So a question is, with the awareness of human kind of geological force, what other types of models of being can we be informed by, and how might this inform our art practices?”
- Rob Reynolds
Quotes from his artist talk on 4/2/25 to Cohort 2 of the Climate Storytelling 2075 program.
Rob Reynolds is a Los Angeles based artist working in painting, sculpture, video and AR installation, with recent projects traversing the analog and digital, investigating being, perception and the ecological with a recent focus on the Arctic in the popular imagination. Rob travelled extensively with earth scientists in the Arctic during the summer of 2023 with support of a National Science Foundation grant, gathering images for an ongoing multi-disciplinary project titled A Fragile Absolute. His most recent work could be considered a personal reflection on the rapidly changing natural world, ranging from confrontation to contemplation, often referencing the Pictures Generation, Pop and Conceptual Art movements, with an interest in image production, technical workmanship and deadpan use of text and language.
Recent exhibitions include: The Snow Show, Sun Valley Musuem of Art, Ketchum, Idaho, Jan 15-April 13, 2025; Breath(e): Towards Climate and Social Justice, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Sept. 15- January 15th 2025, part of the Getty Museum PST:ART Art and Science Collide initiative. Recent installations include Double Iceberg for Berkeley, Transformations of the Human, Berkeley, California; Icebergs and Suns, Mignoni Gallery, NY; Overview, a solo show at Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco; The Word for Weather is Knowledge, a single channel video installation filmed in Ilulissat, Greenland and exhibited in Emergency on Planet Earth at UTA Artists Space, Los Angeles and Paris Photo Grand Palais, Paris, France; Meanwhile, a four-channel video installation on Sunset Blvd. billboards in Los Angeles; Vanishing Point at LAXART; and Just Add Water at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.
Reynolds’ work is in numerous public and private collections, including MAC3 (Hammer Museum, MOCA, LACMA), The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; LAXART; the RISD Museum and Brown University. Rob was recently a Berggruen Institute Artist Fellow. Reviews of his work and his writing have been published in Artforum, The L.A. Review of Books, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, NPR, and elsewhere. Teaching is integral to his overall practice, and over the past decade he has taught seminars in studio art and critical theory, serving on the faculty at Sierra Nevada/University of Nevada MFA Interdisciplinary Art program, lecturing at USC and UCLA; teaching previously at Brown and Harvard. He is a graduate of Brown University (Art and Semiotics 90’) and The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (92’).
Joshua Dawson
“For me, the speculation isn't so much the end product. The end narrative isn't the end product. it's just a step toward framing or designing the right questions that we need to be addressing in helping us refine and build the roadmap toward this equitable, irresistible future.”
“One of the simplest and most direct ways that my work responds to climate science is by beginning with these design exercises of newspapers from the future that help us extrapolate from present trends being documented by scientists and journalists on the front lines of climate change into our future, fictional world. I study how these headlines change and evolve over time, where our characters fit in within this landscape. The point of the project is not just communicating the important lessons that ancient ancestral infrastructure can teach us, but more importantly,
demonstrating how we're increasingly starved of any form of leadership or guidance in this era of climate change.”
- Joshua Dawson
Joshua Dawson is a Los Angeles-based film director and speculative designer whose work The New York Times describes as, “both slightly absurd and eminently believable.” Trained as an architect, he frames the built environment as a protagonist to explore the impact of water politics, resource extraction, and climate change on marginalized communities.
His work has garnered acclaim across architectural and mainstream media, and premiered at international film festivals. He also extends his expertise as a World Builder and Conceptual Design consultant for Hollywood and international productions, most recently serving as the Worldbuilding Architect on the Netflix original anime series Tokyo Override.
