Research Themes

Who & What:

Curated from a wide range of photographers, filmmakers, sound artists, writers, emerging technology developers, interdisciplinary theorists, historians, working in collaboration with scientists, science-based humanities scholars, and community members, Unseen California invites us all to learn about ways in which the arts play an urgent role in addressing issues of access, equality, social, and environmental justice.

2021-2024 Cohort:

Five women artists are taking part as the inaugural group of Artist Researchers working across the California landscape on public land that has largely been used for scientific research, the UC Natural Reserves. Together on this journey they create their own new artworks set out to reframe California’s cultural histories and ecological landscapes beyond the canonical perspectives. The (41) UC Natural Reserve sites are locations stewarded by the University of California, typically used for scientific research, not as sites for art-making, pedagogy, and social justice activism.

The artists are invited to collaborate with archives, scientists, scholars, and local community members to conduct their field study and to create new work that engages with the topics and themes that emerge from their research. Each artist researcher will prioritize on-site exploration and engagement with the unique ecology and scientific research at their chosen site(s).

Each Artist Researcher’s approach is unique and open-ended, thus creating a place for personal projects that freely diverge while challenging overarching concepts, such as “nature” and “landscape,” and address urgent discourse around California land. This long-term research initiative gives these cultural producers opportunities to carve out novel conceptual and interdisciplinary approaches to propose new understandings of the pressing issues that face California’s terrain, its ecological economies, and its bio-cultural diversities.

Four major research themes:

1) the Decolonization of Western Arts Canons,

2) the Interpretation of Land as Nature, Wilderness, Reserve,

3) the notion of Sensing Place & Environment,

4) Imaging and SensingTechnologies as they Visualize/Sense Earth Ecologies.

To address our research questions:

— How do we communicate Arts & Science-inspired stories to diverse 21st-Century audiences?

— How can Interdisciplinary Arts, Ecology and Humanities teams address complex California problems?

— In what ways can Artists engage with science and technology in intriguing ways?

— What is the benefit of producing bodies of works which synthesize the Arts, Ecology, and the Humanities; and what can this synthesis accomplish?

UC Natural Reserve Sites:

Recent Publications:

IMA 2022 Spring/Summer Vol.37

The Voices of Photographers on Nature and Environment

Published in IMA, a Japanese photographic magazine, chief editor of Aperture, Lesley Martin, introduces Unseen California to an international audience and writes:

“American landscape photography cannot be disentangled from the colonial history of Northern Europeans surveying, settling, and selling the American wilderness. Contemporary American photographers working toward a greater awareness of our current climate crisis and a more complete understanding of human impact on the natural world have fully absorbed these lessons. The challenge today is how to approach environmental issues with a holistic understanding of the complex forces that shape our landscape. How can photography about the environment and our use of it grapple with the natural world, while also addressing the politics, and the economic and social histories of the land in which we live? Unseen California’s proposition and ambition feels tremendously invigorating in an area of photography desperately in need of reinvention.”