This piece was written during my MA Arts and Lifestyle Journalism - University of the Arts London.

Find this piece published on the online space of It's Freezing in LA!.

Artist Justin Brice's Climate Change Art as a Trap

[Inertia: [ɪˈnəːʃə] a tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged when no forces act upon them.] Just like inertia, known from physics, global warming will continue increasing unless we respond to it collectively. Through his art that is inspired on the ideas of scientists, poets and philosophers, Justin Brice has dedicated his life to triggering that collective response.

Things are busy for visual and conceptual artist Justin Brice (’74) with the COP26 taking place later this year. He is currently working on a project focussed on coral reef eco systems, which will be exhibited at the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference in November. I connect with him through Zoom as my screen displays him in his studio in Brooklyn, the background showing a glimpse of his colourful personal library. In the first five minutes, his passion for our planet is immediately clear to me. “Corals belong to the critical zone around our planet, a thin atmosphere above us that sustains all life on earth. You and I wouldn’t be here if that weren’t in tact.” He interrupts his explanation to grab a book from the shelf behind him. "Have you heard of the author Elizabeth Kolbert?" he asks. "She explains it so clearly!"

Justin Brice is on a mission to raise awareness about the current state of our planet. By reading about it, learning about it and creating about it. In 2019, his installation REDUCE SPEED NOW! for the Somerset House consisted of nine large solar-powered LED signs as seen on motorways. The signs displayed concerns of climate experts from all around the world such as the Swedish political activist Greta Thunberg, poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and eco-theorist Timothy Morton. The messages were clear and blunt: ‘danger: anthropocentrism’ or ‘time to act!’. “If you have to adjust your speed on the motorway because of a risk of death, the warnings that are shown are to the point, simply because there is no time to lose”, Justin explains. “The messages in my installation are of the same kind. These climate experts have dedicated their lives to thinking about our planet. We have to adjust our speed with the same urgency, because this matter deals with equal mortal danger.”

As a visual and conceptual artist, Brice immerses himself in ecological problems through scientists, poets and philosophers. He re-imagines their findings in his art so that we can collectively feel and respond to them. COP26 is an interesting prospect for Brice, as it allows him to directly reach diplomats and governmental authorities. “Recycling, cutting out meat and flying less are always decisions taken with the best of intentions. But at the end of the day, the person you decide to vote for will make more of a difference than your personal choices. It’s the future- shapers we need to reach if we really want to change something. And they cannot pretend to care about people but not about the planet – those two inevitably go hand in hand.”

An interest in our planet

Brice didn’t do any environmental studies. But the two years he spent abroad whilst studying Liberal Arts at Wake Forest University in North Carolina were enough to spark an interest in the way in which our planet is evolving. That’s not too surprising considering he studied in Venice and Beijing - two places that are confronted with climate change every day. Venice, for example, suffers from daily floods. Beijing’s air, on the other hand, is so polluted that everyone somehow got used to the fact that when you blow your nose, dust comes out. So over the years, climate change has grown under and also - literally - onto Justin’s skin. He has two lines tattooed on both of his arms, one wavy line representing the graph of the average temperature of the earth’s surface over the last 136 years, the other one presenting 400.000 years of carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere - both lines drastically shooting up towards the end. “An everyday reminder as well as an argument I can always bring up in discussions with people who call global warming nothing more than ‘the cycle of nature’.”

In the first part of his career, Justin Brice has worked as a nature photographer for organisations such as The New York Times and National Geographic. Later on, he took the intuitive decision to extend his work to include multiple media as felt that he could no longer express the message with just a photograph. He also wanted to deepen that message, by learning from environmental scientists and philosophers. “The reason why I find science so important is because I need to understand what’s going on. If you don’t understand the issue, it’s hard to effectively illustrate it. There is so much interesting scientific material in the world, but I think that science alone doesn’t do it for most people. And that’s why I don’t want to translate scientific results, I want to re- imagine them. It needs to be emotional for people to truly understand it.”

The feeling

In 2015, Brice has joined a flight with NASA-scientists to document Greenland’s melting ice caps from above. APR 23, 2015 19:08:026 GMT is one of the works that resulted from the mission, named after the place and time where the photograph was taken. The final work is approximately 4 by 5 meters and looks like a big chunk of white mass. The structure of the mass is mysterious, it could be either snow, paint or styrofoam. The sense of ignorance is unpleasant and overwhelming, and standing in front of the large piece of art makes you feel small. Guariglia aims to create the feeling that global warming should instil in us.

The work portrays the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland. “With 38 billion tons of 110,000-year-old ice that’s dumped into the ocean every year, Jakobshavn is one of the fastest melting glaciers in the world”, Justin says. “The piece is composed of acrylic ink printed onto virgin polystyrene with a large-scale printer. As virgin polystyrene is stronger than concrete, it will never decompose. Jakobshavn, on the other hand, will already have lost huge parts by the time you see it.”

However, some of Justin’s works leave no room for personal interpretation. The Exxtinction neon work, exhibited during the 2019 Biennale in Venice, is a subtle adaptation of the logo of Exxon, an American multinational oil and gas corporation. “Everything human beings do comes down to one thing: extinction. Perhaps not at first sight, but if you take a closer look at the cycle, the process becomes clear. When you drive a car, you burn fossil fuels, those fossil fuels go up in the atmosphere and trap heat. Just a tiny bit, but as billions of people are simultaneously doing the same thing, the planet gets warmer. Eventually, we won’t be able to feed ourselves as the planet’s conditions won’t allow us to grow food. Once you see the link between huge (profit-driven) corporations on one hand, and the destruction of our planet on the other, it’s impossible to untangle the two. We may be good at minimising the problem, geological shifts happen quickly - especially with an exponentially growing population like ours. Which is why some of my work needs to be blunt. There is simply is no other way of putting it.”

Distant early warning system

In his book The Medium is the Message, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan describes art as a ‘distant early warning system’. According to Brice, art is supposed to be on the cutting edge of thought. “Art has the capacity to question what’s happening around us. A lot of artists engage with what they care about, in terms of inspiration as well as creation. But despite global warming being a widely discussed topic, very few artists are aware of the stage we’re in.” 


Brice shares his studio in Brooklyn with two like-minded artists. One of them being African- American artist Hank Willis Thomas, who dedicates his work to social injustice, most recently in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement “What Hank does is tremendously important. We have so many things going on in the world that need to be addressed: institutionalised racism, police violence, gender inequality, poverty. But based on the speed we’re currently going; we won’t have a planet in a 30 or 50 years from now. So, I can’t stop thinking to myself: we’re fighting for equal rights, but soon we won’t have a planet to enjoy them. That’s a tragic irony.”

Connecting the dots

Today, it is easier to admit that you simply want to deny climate change, rather than trying to prove your point. Simply because it is becoming increasingly difficult to gather arguments against climate change. The forest fires in Australia and California, for example, caused by a combination of a shortage of rain in dry areas and strong winds. Or the regular hurricanes, as a result of a warming ocean that’s pushing hot, humid air into the atmosphere. Even the current record freezing temperatures in the United States do not imply that global warming isn’t real: the polar vortex - the cold air at the top of the world - is usually held in place by the jet stream, a strong circulating wind. However, the warming of the Northern Hemisphere destabilises this jet stream. And because of sudden blasts of heat into the vortex, the ice-cold Arctic air spills down. It’s all a matter of connecting the dots.

And yet, is it seemingly difficult for many people to realise that climate change is often the cause of forced displacement. “War and refugees are so often mentioned in the same breath, that we tend to forget the other causes.” Justin Brice visited Puerto Rico in 2018 after Hurricane Maria. “Those 410.000 people who had to flee their home, for example, do not settle for the argument ‘cycle of nature’. It is also pretty foolish to believe that this ‘cycle of nature’ would lead to certain parts of the planet simply disappearing.” Tuvalu, a tiny island archipelago between Hawaii and Australia, now sits barely three metres above sea level. The rise of the sea level is a direct result of global warming, triggered by our fossil fuel emissions. Quite fatalistic to believe that our contribution to this alarming development is negligible.

Another reason, apart from fatalism, why some people don’t acknowledge nature’s power could be the fact that they simply don’t rely on it. In many parts of the world, nature is a direct source of supply, both in terms of food as well as in terms of sunlight. People in Iceland, for example, very much live by the natural rhythm of the seasons and structure their day depending on the hours of sun they get. (It is therefore not surprising that the unique connection between humankind and nature is a huge inspiration for a lot of Icelandic artists including world-famous singer Björk) Other examples are the Cubans who grow the majority of their food in their very own garden. Or the Arabs who are able to cross the desert with the stars being their only point of reference. In this way nature transcends its role of only being a striking scenery we admire through the window on a train ride, or on a much-needed walk after a hectic working week.

In many Western countries nature is valued, but its functional role is limited. This could be an explanation for the lack of acceptance amongst many people when it comes to climate change. Justin Brice has spent two decades of his life in different parts of Asia, but has been living and working in Brooklyn for some years now. He points out that Brooklyn is quite a ‘strange beast’ in terms of climate change awareness. “The people living here are not confronted with climate change on a daily basis. The only thing that’s tangible here are the extreme temperatures. Summers are getting much warmer, some random winter days much colder. However, most people living in Brooklyn are aware of what’s going on. And I realise that’s rare, because the general public has no clue.”

The capacity of art

Simply said: unless you experience climate change at the frontline (as a scientist or a farmer, for instance), you can actively try to understand what’s going on, but you won’t directly feel it.

And this is where art can intervene. To show people who are not at the frontline what climate change is all about. “In a crisis like this, art becomes a tremendously important tool. Especially in an ecological crisis that’s not equally noticeable for everybody. Some experience changes day by day, others won’t notice anything for years. However, global warming is universal.”

“A lot of artists work around dystopian themes, but I am not interested in this way of looking at the world. It fulfils a role, of course, because people need to think about how things could potentially look like in a few years from now. However, I’d rather reimagine the future instead of using it as a tool to scare people. I have done work in previous stages of my career that was a lot more abstract. But there simply is no time left for complexity. The subject itself is already so complicated, that I want my art to be accessible.”

“As I deal with a subject matter that’s not really uplifting on itself, the aesthetic side fulfils an important role. I need my art to be persuasive. As a matter of fact, art focused on ecological issues is almost like a Venus flytrap: the carnivorous plant looks funky and attractive from afar, but as soon as an insect gets too close, it gets sucked up. Same thing my with art: I seduce people with beauty, and once I got their attention, they find out what the underlying message is all about.”