An Introduction to Climates
Climate is a word that comes with an implication of time. Used in the plural, it conjures the study of change in atmospheres, of trends and conditions, over the long-to mid-term. To comment on climates requires distance, an examination, a long view. It is the extrapolation of facts, the taking of averages, that allows us to predict the future and steady our present. It is not a reactive process, but it is dynamic.
Article by:
The production of art is also concerned with time, as is our consumption of it. We classify by the period it is created and we cannot view it without the past — global, local and personal — affecting our vision. We can accept then that the art we produce, and our reception to it, is shaped by pressures from all sides: fluctuations in attitude, surroundings, temperature both literal and figurative. But it could also be said that it is willed into form by something constant; a work of art is a response to an ongoing concern.
Taking art as an expression of environmental and cultural thought, CLIMATES, the seventeenth issue of fine print, looks to the tendencies evident in its production over time. What be relied upon to stay the same and what can we expect to change? Can our ever-evolving creative language match, amplify or affect an environment?
Lucien Alperstein (NSW/SA), Celia Dottore (SA), Bernadette Klavins (SA), Tess Maunder (QLD), Chris Reid (SA), Laura Wills (SA), Fulvia Mantelli (SA) and Emma-Kate Wilson (NSW) approach the environmental, political and social conditions that we create in.