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In her class “Imagining Ecological Futures: Visual Arts and Ecology,” Jessica Segall, artist-in-residence with the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, dedicated the spring 2025 semester encouraging learners to explore traditional and contemporary methods of depicting nature.
Segall, a multimedia creator who has undertaken several residencies in the U.S. and internationally, concentrates her artistry on “hostile and endangered landscapes,” as stated on her website. She has staged solo exhibitions in Miami, New York, Richmond, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, along with displays in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France. Additionally, she has participated in collective exhibitions across Thailand, Uruguay, Ecuador, Korea, Taiwan, China, Sweden, Indonesia, Mongolia, and Cuba. Upcoming showcases this year include a solo display at Kunsthalle Seinäjoki in Finland and a new public sculpture for the Re-Nature Festival in Amsterdam.
In a recent artistic installation titled Human Energy, Segall presented sculptural components influenced by oil pipelines, encircled by four screens exhibiting 30-minute video loops. The footage featured scenes filmed at a Chevron oil field in the U.S. and in Azerbaijan, where immersion in crude oil is regarded as a therapeutic practice.
Segall, who has previously worked alongside scientists, was enthusiastic about the opportunity at Caltech. “I was eager to focus on something related to climate change, and Caltech’s affiliation with JPL and the comprehensive Earth sciences being conducted there appeared to be an incredible opportunity. There’s vast potential for integrating new scientific technologies to broaden our vision,” Segall remarks.
Segall has utilized high-speed cameras to capture not only crude oil baths but also processes like shattering ice sculptures and swimming alongside alligators, which heightened her interest in exploring the compressed ultrafast photography camera at the Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, capable of capturing up to 100 billion frames per second. At the Kavli Nanoscience Institute, she delved into nano-scale sculpture, employing a laser writing technique called 2-photon lithography to craft sculptures the stature of a human hair.
The “Imagining Ecological Futures” course prompted students to first investigate how nature has been portrayed historically. “Most historical imagery is centered on humans. Landscape painting in Europe only emerged after the Renaissance,” Segall clarifies. “Nature wasn’t considered a subject on its own. You’d encounter volumes of medicinal plants, yet no visualization of nature devoid of mythological, spiritual, or ethical themes. We examined art history from the earliest representations of hunting, 20th-century environmental photography, and modern ecofeminist art, posing questions such as ‘Were these portrayals meant to depict nature as sublime or romantic? Did they convey notions of ownership or cultivation of nature?’ Then we queried, ‘How do we represent nature with the new awareness that we can’t endlessly exploit the planet’s resources?’”
Students were also encouraged to illustrate facets of nature through drawing and photography. “We selected California smog as a topic and explored how we might visually represent air,” Segall mentions. Through still imagery and narrative, students developed a photo-roman, a video chronicling their personal experiences with nature. “The students were fantastic,” she notes. “They were incredibly engaged and contributed diverse perspectives compared to the art majors I typically teach.”
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