Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to announce 2.7°, a group exhibition featuring five artists investigating the variegations of climate change and the implications of weather on humanity. This exhibition opens January 26 and will be on view through March 9, 2019 with an opening on January 26 from 5 – 8PM.

In October 2018 the New York Times broke the news of an astounding, globally impacting report by the IPCC (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). 2.7°F was announced as the new global rise in temperature degrees that will be reached by the year 2040. This counters previous research that predicted the Earth would see catastrophic consequences from climate change in the next 100 years with a global rise in temperatures by 3.6°F. As such, scientists predict that if changes to our industry and energy production are not made immediately, in twenty-one years, the Earth and all of its residents will experience life-threatening results. This news galvanized an already dire issue, making it pressing not just to scientists and lovers of green energy. This urgency is felt across all paths, all fields, including the arts.

2.7° contextualizes a variety of artists processes, approaches and attitudes towards the environment around them. It is through the interpretation and examination of data visualization, social dynamics and the earth's alchemic power, which the artwork on display here hints at, cajoles and forces the implications for us. The inevitability of dramatic change to our environment is denied by some and overlooked by others. Similar to the way scientists compound this important information with time stamps (2040) and numerical degree change (2.7°F or 1.5°C), the cumulative effect of a group of artists aestheticizing the consequences serves as a new alternative form of documentation.

Cynthia Daignault’s formal painting is a tongue in cheek simulacrum of the way we experience, view and perhaps unconsciously distance ourselves from Nature. The implication here is from the viewer’s perspective: we must ask ourselves how we can preserve and protect the environment while also asking what is lost and gained in that preservation.

Justin Brice Guariglia’s blunt text-based works combine simple statements with abstract representations of our shifting environs, which compound the sublime beauty of loss. A neon-based artwork hung in the front window of the gallery shouts an advertisement for the ages while additional artworks use a metal substrate for more warnings that are enhanced with entrancing imagery.

Allison Janae Hamilton founds her practice in her childhood and family homes in the rural South. Her magical and mystical photo-based images bring together her personal history with the land, and point to larger issues of how power and race differentiate the socio-economic impact of those who live most closely with the land.

Christine Tarkowski’s sculptures and textile-based work challenge viewers to look deeply at a fundamental level at what it means to both construct, and deconstruct. An ominous cloak of fabric paired with glass and metal forms that are constructed and then deconstructed with the artist’s own hand, are prescient. Chance and intention blend, merging and separating, as do the concepts of systems in decline, the dissolution of order, activated through processes of alchemical invention and the willful destruction of exposed systems of knowledge.

Margo Wolowiec’s series of handwoven tapestries featuring images of catastrophic weather and the subsequent media and social media hype that have become part and parcel of how we experience weather. Distorted screenshots, weather maps, and other imagery call to mind the chaotic experience leading up to a weather event, and simultaneously call into question the motives of such exposure, leading us to ask, does the hype help or harm?

In conjunction with 2.7°, the gallery will be hosting a panel discussion in late February with participating artists, as well as noted meteorologists and storm-chasers exploring climate change, weather, its impact on humanity and the awesome visual of nature from a visual artist’s standpoint. A date, list of participants and more details will be announced shortly.