I’m excited to let everyone know about this artist, Lauren Strohacker, whose art examines the ever-growing conflict between humans and animals as our manufactured environments (physical, political, and economical) expand into natural habitats. I love this art, and I love Lauren’s message. Lauren now has a Creative Residency in Scottsdale, Arizona, titled Coyote Anthropophony. This is an interdisciplinary project that utilizes sound, photography, projection, and education to better understand historic and contemporary relationships between humans and coyotes.
“Coyote Anthropophony, visually and sonically explores coyote adaptation to life alongside humans in suburban and city environments. Collaborating with art and technology collective, urbanSTEW, I capture images of local urban coyotes with infrared trail cameras and record and manipulate city sounds (the anthropophony) to mimic coyote vocalizations, conceptually blurring our perceptions of human and animal domain.”, says Lauren.
In conjunction with this installation, Lauren will be giving a workshop which will focus on coyote education and art making. Visitors will learn more about urban coyotes through a screening of Citizen Coyote, an educational/informational presentation aimed at youth and classrooms, and everyone else. Following the 30 minute film, Strohacker will lead an all-ages workshop where she’ll teach visitors of all ages how to transform local maps of Metro Phoenix cities into origami coyotes — see the little fellow to the left!! If you are in the area, here are the details: Coyote Anthropophony Workshop with Ecological Artist, Lauren Strohacker, Saturday April 29th, 2017, 11am – 2pm, 7034 E Indian School Rd, Scottsdale, Arizona 85251.
Here is Lauren’s apropos artists statement. Thank you, Lauren, for your amazing vision and for spreading it via your beautiful art and dedicated workshops!
Animals disappear: some literally, in the wake of human expansion, some metaphorically, becoming ubiquitous and fading into the urban landscape.
My suburban upbringing was filled with mediated representations of the animal: literature, television, and corporate branding. While the feeling of attachment to wildlife was authentic, the wildlife itself was artificial. Even an encounter with a living, breathing animal is bound by unseen regulation. Populations are controlled, predators are decimated, and survivors are displaced to the edge of human comfortability. Boundary lines are drawn and animals are expected to obey, and subversion of this obedience is punishable by death.
These realizations underpin my exploration as an artist. Often collaborating with environmental organizations, I compose interdisciplinary interventions that utilize human networks in order to reimagine and reintroduce wildlife systems destabilized by our manufactured environments. Both real and imaginary interactions with animals influence human perceptions of cohabitation vs. conflict, a dichotomy that ultimately determines the uncertain fate of wildlife in the Anthropocene.
Coyote Yipps 