Jay Critchley as Provocateur

An Evening with artist Jay Critchley
Doors open at 6 PM with Artist talk at 7 PM  followed by discussion.

event for Don't look away! exhibit@mobius

Jay is a Provincetown-based conceptual and multi-media artist and activist whose work has traversed the globe, showing across the US and in Argentina, Japan, England, Spain, France, Holland, Germany and Columbia. He founded the controversial patriotic Old Glory Condom Corporation and was recently featured on LOGO TV and BBC/UK. His recent NYC show was reviewed in the New York Times, The New Yorker and the Village Voice. His first museum survey was held at the Provincetown Art Association/Museum, and will travel to Florida Atlantic University in 2016. The 2015 Provincetown International Film Festival featured his videos, including the HBO award-winning “Toilet Treatments”. 

He has taught at the Museum School at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and has had artist residencies at: Harvard University; AS220, Rhode Island; Harvestworks, NYC; Williams College, MA; Real Art Ways, Hartford; Milepost 5, Portland, OR, Fundacion Valparaiso, Mojacar, Andalucia, Spain, and CAMAC, Marnay-sur-Seine, France. 

He founded the Provincetown Community Compact, which runs artist residencies, and the Swim for Life AIDS/women’s health benefit, which has raised $4M and is scheduled for September 12, 2015. 

www.jaycritchley.com

Don't look away! exhibit

JAY CRITCHLEY AT MOBIUS!

Dialoguers

TEN FOOT SEA LEVEL RISE??!!!

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-point-of-no-return-climate-change-nightmares-are-already-here-20150805

EXTINCTION IS A REALITY

Neanderthal woman reconstructed by National Geographic scientists using DNA info from bones.

PRESS RELEASE FOR UPCOMING ART EXHIBITION

 An exhibition of art will be presented at Mobius, 55 Norfolk Street, Central Square, Cambridge entitled  DON’T LOOK AWAY! (www.mobius.org).The exhibit will run from September 12 through September 20 with gallery hours from 12-5 PM on weekends and by appointment. There will be an opening reception on September 12 from 6-9 PM.

A special event on Saturday, September 19 will be held from 6- 9PM with renowned public artist and provocateur Jay Critchley. He will present and discuss environmental art from his recent retrospective at the Provincetown Museum of Art.

The DON’T LOOK AWAY! exhibit is the outgrowth of a process between artists and environmentalists examining their own system of thought. Over several months, they have practiced an experimental form of dialogue that attempted to address questions arising from the overwhelm of climate disruption. Artists Margaret Bellafiore, Lydia Eccles, Milan Kohout, Claire Lau and Judy Werlin, with support from writers Steve Wineman and John Pitkin, have responded with developing a variety of work including writing, sculpture, painting, video and performance. They have struggled with issues of hope and despair, social activism, fracking, and the larger underlying dynamics of what makes a healthy society. Much of the work will be interactive as the artists are interested in having viewers participate by adding to the work.

A closing reception will be held on Sunday, September 20 from 12-5 PM. A public dialogue will be held. Activists who are protesting the expansion of the Spectra gas pipeline in Weymouth, West Roxbury and Dedham will participate in this collective reflection.

A blog at http://margaretmobius.blogspot.com posts an ongoing record of their struggle.

HEALTH RISK from gas compressor by Dr. Curt Nordgaard

The North Weymouth compressor station: An unacceptable health risk

Prepared by Curtis Nordgaard, MD Msc

Resident Pediatrician, Boston Children's Hospital / Boston Medical Center

What health conditions are associated with compressor station emissions?

-Particulate matter 1,2: Asthma, heart attacks, diabetes

-Benzene 3 : Leukemia, bone marrow suppression

-Formaldehyde 4,5: Asthma, several types of cancer

-Nitrogen oxide 6 Produces hazardous ground level ozone, an asthma trigger associated with respiratory tract irritation and infection

Do compressor stations emit dangerous levels of these pollutants?

-Benzene levels have been measured near compressor stations that far exceed cancer-causing

Thresholds. Formaldehyde levels can exceed cancer-causing thresholds up to at least a half mile away from compressor stations8

Do residents living near compressor stations notice compressor emissions?

-Residents living near compressor stations report severe headaches, sinus problems, and throat

irritation more often than residents living further away.

Would additional emissions make a difference?

-Six industries in the Fore River Basin accounted for 84 periods of federal pollution standard violations in the past 3 years, in addition to their baseline operating pollution. -Significant background emissions increase the likelihood that additional emissions will reach toxic or carcinogenic levels

Why haven't we heard more about compressors and health risks before?

-Many compressor stations are built in rural areas near much smaller populations, where fewer

people are exposed to the pollutants and the health risks are therefore lower.

What additional health risks will we accept in our communities so that Spectra can build a

compressor station?

-A child with leukemia?

-A parent or sibling with a heart attack?

-A neighbor in the Emergency Department with an asthma attack?

If we value the health of our communities, our families, and our children, then we must

acknowledge that increased risks of asthma, heart attacks, and cancer are unacceptable.

1 http://epa.gov/ncer/science/pm/

2 Solimini et al. BMC Public Health 2015 15:70.

3 http://www.epa.gov/IRIS/subst/0276.htm

4 Dannemiller et al. Indoor Air 2013 23(4):285.

5 http://www.epa.gov/IRIS/subst/0419.htm

6 http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/search2/f?./temp/~pm6jsl:1

7 Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. (2010). Barnett Shale Formation Air Monitoring Projects.

8 Macey et al. Environmental Health 2014, 13:82

9 Steinzor et al. New Solutions 2013, 23:55

10 www.echo.epa.gov

GLOBAL TRAUMA

What do you do when you feel overwhelmed by what is happening to the planet earth? You know, the place where we all live.

Photo: Margaret Bellafiore

What if you have been reading Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert and Barbara Kingsolver? Oil and Honey, The Sixth Extinction and Migrant Behavior, in that order. Not very hopeful stuff. Apocalyptic, actually. A dark future where water is either scarce or poisoned or both. Where air is foul and hard to breathe. Where bees collapse and crops fail. Where wars start because some people have what they need and others don’t. It becomes a sort of trauma.

In 2007, Bill Mc Kibben and his Middlebury College students started www.350.org as a way to do something about this. They picked 350 as that was the number of carbon dioxide molecules in parts per million that scientists all over the world had agreed was the safe upper limit in the thin “skin” around the earth, our atmosphere. Any more would heat up the planet to a level that could drastically change life as we know it.

Only six years later, scientists measured the CO2 in the atmosphere to be 400 parts per million, probably for the first time in more than 3 million years of Earth history. And the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is continuing to rise at about 2 ppm every year. Those college kids could never have forseen that.

Well, wait a minute. We had a really cold winter last year. This heating up can’t be happening, right? We breathe out carbon dioxide. It can’t be that bad for the environment, right? And trees use it. It can’t really heat up the whole planet, can it? My older brother told me recently the earth has not increased in temperature. Huh? The data on this is complex. I am not about to get into an argument with him-especially if I am a guest in his house and he is feeding me dinner.

Photo: Margaret Bellafiore

But the oceans are warmer whether he agrees with me or not. When storms move over warmer water, they become more powerful. I get that. Like Hurricane Sandy. When it moved over the Atlantic in October 2012, the ocean was two degrees warmer than normal. But this is just “cyclical,” right? Tell that to my niece’s friends who have still not recovered physically or psychically from the fourteen foot storm surge that suddenly came up flooding their Staten Island home and submerging their car? They couldn’t even drive away from it. They had to run from their house, in the dark with water up to their chests to higher ground.

And the seas continue to rise. Where does all the melting ice from the glaciers go? I have seen that. What will happen to island communities? Or cities on the shore? Like most of our cities world wide!

There have been warmings before. Take the Permian Era where the earth was six degrees warmer than present. You know what happened? A die off. Ninety percent of the earth’s living things died. Gone. Gone Gone. It takes time to recover from a die off. A long time. It only took millions of years for the ten percent that was left to become what we have now. Well, that’s ancient history. That happened three hundred million years ago. Not to worry, right?. That sort of thing isn’t happening now, or is it? Fifty percent of the coral polyps in The Great Barrier Reef have gone extinct in the last thirty years. That fast? Huh? Gone. Gone. Gone.
Carbon dioxide drives global warming. Scientists have agreed to another safe limit: the temperature of the earth cannot increase by more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). What do we do? Do we stop breathing out? Or do we look at how much is being released by the fossil fuel companies? Fossil-fuel companies currently have about 2,795 gigatons of carbon already contained in their coal and oil and gas reserves, and they do plan to use it. That much release of carbon dioxide is five times higher than the set limit of 565 gigatons. Scientists have agreed to that number of carbon and no higher, would keep Earth from heating up to the treacherous increase of 2 degrees Celsius.

OK, as soon as we start talking in “gigatons,” we loose everyone because no one can wrap their minds around one billion tons. Eyes glaze over. People turn away. As a result, it is a lot easier to deny the whole thing and while we are at it, we will deny the fact that we had anything to do with it. I get that, too. Maybe that’s what’s driving my brother’s thinking (or lack of). Maybe that’s why there are so many climate deniers.

Photo: Margaret Bellafiore

If present emission rates stay at their present level, (31 gigatons globally in 2011 and rising), the outside limit of 565 gigatons will be reached by 2028.Hmmm…How old will I be then? Or more importantly, how old will my grandchildren be? Now, this is traumatic. But don’t the oil tycoons like the Koch Brothers have grandchildren too? It is sheer madness that they keep sucking oil out of the earth for profit or is it just greed? How much is a healthy planet worth? Not all billionaires share their lunacy. The Rockefeller family just announced they are divesting from oil and tar sands mining. Anyone can see it is a bad investment.

I will be stuck in trauma unless I start doing something about it. Take action. Even Mary Pipher (The Green Boat) doesn’t hold out for any solution any time soon. And she writes that it might really be too late to do anything about reversing the damage done by all of us on this place where we all live. Nevertheless, she is quite pragmatic in her own decision to stay positive and take action. I have begun to see this as the way out of this global trauma. I am taking actions and joining with others (350 mass.org and www.sustainablesouthshore.org) who feel as I do. Last week I marched in NYC with 400,000 others in an amazing cry out for action, the People’s Climate March. Can you imagine what this sounded like? Four hundred thousand voices shouting “Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! Fossil Fuel Has Got To Go!” over and over and over as we marched down the Avenue of the Americas (how fitting a street name!).

I feel a lot better now and less traumatized.

Margaret Bellafiore is a Mobius Artist Group member (www.mobius.org). She became interested in the subject of trauma when she interviewed returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to college life for her sound installation at Mobius, Combat to Campus, the Voices of Veterans. In 2012 she wrote about this experience for the American Association of University Professors. (http://www.aaup.org/article/combat-campus#.U9_isvldWSp) Bellafiore recently worked on writing projects with student veterans at Bridgewater State University where she teaches art. She also wondered if there was a connection between the denial people have to interpersonal violence and the way society responds to climate change.