Lauren Strohacker is an eco-political artist who emphasizes the non-human in an increasingly human-centric world. Her practice is grounded in community, layering public and private space with representations of wild animals.
Strohacker’s work is an antithesis of, if not an antidote for, Shifting Baseline Syndrome–the communal process of forgetting natural systems over time, normalizing the ongoing degradation of those systems–in the context of wild animals. Strohacker's practice is co-creative and cross-disciplinary, collaborating with wildlife organizations, artists, experts, and community members on site-specific projects. Together, they “reintroduce” wild animals into human-centric spaces in ways that are uniquely responsive to the target sites and the ecoregion. Projects focus on animals who have been controlled, displaced, eradicated, and, eventually, forgotten by anthropocentric societies. These creative reintroductions are achieved through street art, digital projection, sound installation, sculpture, and new media. Conceptually, placing wild animals in human spaces reflects larger contexts of ecology, politics, and radical interspecies municipalism.
“No longer the wild, “untrammeled” nature beloved by North American environmentalists, nature in the Anthropocene is always inflected by human actions, even when we don’t intend it. Even remote places where no human has ever set foot and deep layers of the world’s oceans are being transformed by climate change and ocean acidification, for example, whether we are individually aware of it or not. Strohacker’s works, with their sophisticated mix of attention to the real world of nature and attention to its many mediations and representations, are a brilliant gateway to these discussions about the futures of nature and humans as well as nonhumans’ places in those futures.”
Gallery Representation: Visions West Contemporary