Under Metallic Skies by Christina Battle
Museum London
June 1st – November 3rd, 2024
Curated by Cassandra Getty
By Étienne Lavallée
Museum London’s exhibition Under Metallic Skies features the work of Christina Battle and considers how our community will function as a biome and how that biome is threatened by climate change. The exhibition looks at how we can continue to connect with each other during mass extinction events. Battle is an Edmonton, Alberta-based artist who earned her Ph.D at Western University. Battle’s environmental art focuses on climate change, land dynamics, and destruction, begging the question of how relationality and resilience will affect our communities during cataclysmic change. Battle’s work focuses on the environment but views community as inextricable from the ecosystem.
“Notes to self” is a video piece with a series of brief sentences and sentiments displayed on a burning piece of paper. The presented format mimics the fleeting nature of communication through microblogging social media platforms like Twitter and Meta Threads, utilizing one brief sentence to represent the intimate thoughts of a stranger. The messages are anonymous, and uncredited. They could be held by Battle or Battle’s friends and colleagues. Similar to microblogging platforms, the messages displayed in the video are also commonly held, stating feelings such as “These are some truly dark times,” reflecting on the overall absence of hope in our lives and futures. “I’m pissed. Basically, all of the time” connects to the rage and helplessness of our social conditions. “The blatant grift of it all” critiques the absence of authenticity in online communication. “The never-ending extraction” reminds the viewers of our extraction-based economy in North America. “Heavy times,” “#fearwins,” “nobody wins, it’s just about who loses more slowly.” all impart the profound pessimism that both Battle and many viewers share.
“The climate crisis is not equally distributed” is deeply impactful. As the paper burns down, we are reminded how our unstable climate will affect countries like Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, which are at risk of desertification and food insecurity.[1] As we view museum exhibitions in the comfort of air conditioning, we must recall the responsibility we hold to others on our planet. This portion of the exhibition calls for us to consider how privilege insulates us in North America from the worst effects of climate change.
“Dearfield, Colorado” (2010) is an elegy to an African American settlement founded by Oliver Toussaint Jackson. This is a part of Battle’s Mapping the Prairies Through Disaster series. Dearfield was a bid for African American Sovereignty in the hostile racial landscape of the United States after the Civil War and WWI. Black Americans pursued self-determination in a post-war country that sought new means to oppress and exploit Black workers. Dearfield offered Black Americans a chance to thrive, but this was shuttered with the dust bowl conditions of the Great Depression. At Dearfield’s 1910 founding, the population was 700, and by 1940, the population was reduced to 12. All that remains are a few skeletons of buildings and a memorial plaque, a photo of which accompanies the video. Battle’s video is paired with text from Larry O’Hanlon:
“The process starts with a little dry wind in a dusty, arid place that kicks up small dust grains so they collide with larger sand grains…the smaller grains steal electrons from the larger grains, giving the smaller grains a negative charge and the larger grains a positive charge…Next, the negatively charged smaller grains are lofted above the ground by breeze, creating a negatively charged region in the air above the positively charged ground. That separation of charges is an electrical field.” [2]
The loop of video opens on ramshackle buildings against a blue prairie sky. The frames are bright and sun-filled, the wild Black-eyed Susan flowers forming a bottom border in cheery yellow, in contrast to the quiet desolation of the abandoned buildings. The video is without music, and the backing sound is purely environmental, the rushing of air and gentle bird song. At 1:45 in the video, the sound of a passing vehicle or possible airplane backs the images of empty homes. The video loop ends on a semi-truck rapidly passing by the remains of Dearfield before beginning again. The absence of people is the greatest presence in this loop, and the brightness of the prairie sky keeps the footage from becoming overly mournful, and yet Battle’s imagery and accompanying text suggest this could be in the future for prairie residents, given predicted increases in heat waves, droughts, intensive agricultural practices, and soil degradation.
“The Community is not a Haphazard Collection of Individuals” is Battle’s ongoing participatory work, utilizing community engagement to plant seeds. The seed functions as a stand-in for both the individual and the community, because the mechanism of a seed may be individual, but they function as communities. The seed actuates the participating individual as a member of the community, and planting becomes the means to integrate the community as an organic biome.
Environmental dread has a powerful presence in all of Battle’s art, including in the piece “are we going to get blown off the planet [and what should we do about it]” (2022). Environmental destruction exists all around us and lives within us. Yet these harrowing years of death are treated with tenderness. In the background of florals, the small blooming plants, there is a remarkable tenderness with which Battle treats the inconsolable loss of biodiversity.
The community engagement aspect of Battle’s exhibition gently counteracts the accompanying dread by giving museum goers the opportunity to take small but significant action. The opportunity to plant native plants to mitigate biodiversity loss is meaningful in the face of an all-encompassing event like climate catastrophe. Planting a seed makes us feel just a little less powerless.
Under Metallic Skies was on view at Museum London in London Ontario from June 1st to November 3rd, 2024.
[1] “Horn of Africa Drought Emergency,” UNHCR,” last modified March, 2023, https://www.unhcr.org/emergencies/horn-africa-drought-emergency.
[2] Larry O’Hanlon, “Dust Storms Are Truly Electric,” ABC Science. August 18, 2006, https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2006/08/18/1717965.htm.