Erika Blumenfeld

Erika Blumenfeld’s installation incorporates photographs, charred debris collected from recent wildfires across the Southwest, desert sand, and a bonsai-trained tree native to Texas. This new work poignantly studies shifting water patterns due to climate change, natural resource and land ownership, and increasing drought in the Southwest.

Blumenfeld approaches her work as an ecological archivist, and has chronicled a range of subjects including the physics of atmospheric and astronomic phenomena, bioluminescent organisms, wildfires, and the remote landscape of Antarctica. In each series, she investigates the simple beauty and complex predicament of our environment and ecologies, working with institutions such as the McDonald Observatory, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, South African National Antarctic Program and the organization Cape Farewell.

Erika Blumenfeld’s growing concern for the injustices against our environment has led her to document the ecological and human impact caused by anthropogenic environmental negligence and climate disruption. Currently, she is making artworks about the aftermath of the recent wildfires in the U.S. Southwest, photographing and collecting the charred remains of trees, grasses, pinecones and needles, dirt and animal bones. This new Wildfire series is both a eulogy to the incinerated flora and fauna as well as forensic evidence of the impact of climate disruption.

Women & Their Work is a partner of the Visual Artists Network (VAN). This project is made possible in part through support from the Visual Artists Network Exhibition residency, which is a program of the National Performance Network. Major contributors are the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.  For more information: www.npnweb.org

Watch a video of Erika Blumenfeld’s Artist Talk here.