‘A History of the Future: The New Landscape of Climate Change’ Opens at Palitz Gallery

The Palitz Gallery exhibition “A History of the Future: The New Landscape of Climate Change” opens Thursday, Nov. 6. This will be the first New York City solo exhibition post superstorm Sandy by partners and photographers Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris, co-founders of the Canary Project, an art collective.

Sayler/Morris, “Extreme Weather Events I: Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, 2005”

The exhibit is open Monday to Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. and runs through Jan. 29, 2015. The gallery will be closed Nov. 27-29 and Dec. 23-Jan. 4. The exhibition is free and open to the public.  Contact 212-826-0320 or lubin@syr.edu for more information.

“A History of the Future: The New Landscape of Climate Change” includes 13 archival pigment prints from photographers and SU faculty members Sayler and Morris’ ongoing investigation of landscapes where scientists are studying the impact of climate change. Incisive images from Venice, the Netherlands, Louisiana after hurricane Katrina and New York City after superstorm Sandy document the often surreal and sometimes catastrophic evidence of our changing environment. The meaning of the images depends on their context within the larger discourse about climate change—scientific, journalistic, activist and artistic.

The Canary Project launched in 2006 as a project to photograph landscapes throughout the world where scientists are studying the impacts of climate change, specifically the point in time when human activities have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.

Sayler/Morris, “Rising Sea Level XV: Venice, Italy, 2006”

To date more than 100 artists, designers, writers, educators and scientists have participated in this project. Various versions of the exhibition have traveled the world over, including Kunsthal Museum, Rotterdam The Netherlands; Museum Belvedere, Heerenveen, the Netherlands; and the National Arts Club in New York City.

The Smithsonian recently granted a fellowship to Sayler and Morris. They currently study the use of archives to construct narratives of time in exhibitions at the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. They are interested in exploring how a sensitivity to disparate time scales—human, geologic and cosmologic—can deepen understanding of anthropogenic climate change.