Claire Millikin – Life Forms: Facing the Anthropocene

As the Anthropocene (the era shaped by human activity) roars forward with increasing global climate and social crises, a small group of nonbinary and women artists in coastal Maine is creating art that speaks between and across life forms, leveraging art to address challenges of our all-too-human era. The group, called Life Forms, recently launched an exhibit at Portland’s Speedwell Contemporary (Life Forms: Gather). This article is not a review of that exhibit but a meditation on two artworks displayed in it, understanding those works as responses to our nation’s “stuck” condition of climate and social crises, reflecting on America’s entrenched immersion in hallmark qualities of the Anthropocene. The artists verónica pérez and Celeste Roberge are not “stuck” in terms of their ability to create art; on the contrary, they are engaged in immediate and thriving practices of artistic creation. But their art does respond to entrenched modalities, stuck places, of social and environmental harm, responding through multiplicities of approach.

Sculptor verónica pérez (they/them) extends a practice of hair (both real and manufactured) sculptures, with the work Bore in the Darkness of Our Hair; before SZA. Fashioned of plant-based hair fibers, gems, jewels, beads, fake flowers, and plaster, the massive piece suspends above the gallery space, like a disco ball except in place of glass tesserae the artist has created densely braided shining black hair fibers. The hair is brilliantly embedded with fake and real jewels, reflecting how diamonds are life forms, part of the earth’s living capacity to produce beauty. As the hair sculpture sways in air currents of the gallery space it takes on a spectral aura, a figure of human presence that is at once silenced and watching. Hair is a key signifier of what we often call race (even as race is not a biological category but a socially constructed method of separating human beings into fixed hierarchies). Race, as a social system of belief, has its roots in the history of American colonization. Pérez’s sculpture evokes curly and wavy black hair, hair encoded in American racial stratification. The work makes of this hair a gorgeous and omnipresent sculptural dance. It contends with ways that hair is a life form, emerging from our human bodies, flowing from our heads, and heavy with social meaning. America may be stuck in a regressive social discourse around race, but pérez’s sculpture releases that rigid hierarchy of social space and welcomes instead a gaze of play and contemplation. Beneath the disco ball of bejeweled braids, every visitor to the gallery metaphorically wears that hair, dissolving the absurdist boundaries of race as belief system that controls America’s social spaces and resource access. Pérez’s work responds to and subverts practices of exclusionary spaces of race in America, presenting a kind of chandelier of shimmering hair that transcends, in the sense of moving above, quotidian categories of social space.

The sense of hair as a source of natural fecundity that pérez articulates in their sculpture resonates with sculptor Celeste Roberge’s photographic collage (in eight pieces) 8 Days a Week. Roberge deploys photography and seaweed to join across a temporal gap of nearly thirty years, emphasizing seaweed as a source of natural fecundity and vitality. To create 8 Days a Week Roberge reclaimed a self-portrait she had created in Florida back in 1994 and across multiple gelatin silver reprints of the photograph she layered seaweed gathered in 2018 from the coast of Maine. The self-portrait is repeated but its size slightly altered to match the shape of different types of seaweed that Roberge ingeniously fashions into fanciful garments covering the image of unclothed younger self. Presenting the work in 2024, in Speedwell Contemporary, one was struck by the precise span of thirty years from the time of the self-portrait photographs’ creation, in 1994, to the time of the images displayed with the Life Forms group.

Roberge’s self-portrait shows a nude, young cisgendered woman who appears self-confident and strong, standing in a stripped-down house before a threshold. In 1994, the United States Supreme Court had recently upheld Roe v. Wade, reaffirming the right to choose (in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, 1992). In 2024, the time of the work’s exhibition at Speedwell Contemporary, the United States Supreme Court had recently struck down a woman’s right to control her own reproductive choices, in the Dobbs decision of 2022. While this political shift during thirty years in which basic rights of cisgendered women have been drastically eroded is not the direct impetus behind Roberge’s creation of the mesmerizing series of photographs, it stands as it were in the background or as the backlight of the work. In 1994, the young, self-assured artist records her own unclothed image. In the black-and-white self-portrait she asserts her presence, her strength, and her ability to directly connect with the viewer. She is standing in a house at the time newly acquired that the artist had stripped down to the studs, and so the house and the woman are equally disrobed and full of potential. The sense of a doorway enframing her adds to the momentum of the artist’s movement forward into the future in this reiterated self-portrait.

Roberge, as a member of the Maine Seaweed Council, began gathering beach-cast seaweed on southern Maine beaches when she returned to the place of her origin after retiring as a full-time professor of art. 8 Days a Week references the Beatles’s song, to which the artist frequently listened in the days when she was working on this piece, and the title also references her exploration of sartorial culture and choices. Every day, often more than once a day (eight days a week), we present ourselves as clothed personas. Women, ciswomen and transwomen, are more scrutinized and stared at than any other members of society, bearing the continual burden of what film theorist Laura Mulvey memorably calls the male gaze. That does not mean literally the gaze of cisgendered men but rather the way that gendered politics construct women as fetishized objects to be judged according to their beauty or lack thereof. Each of Roberge’s photographs is given a titular day of the week, as each self-portrait image is variably clothed in different arrays of seaweed. Roberge shapes the seaweed to invoke fantastic couture fashion statements, the photographs remade by the sculptural application of seaweed. Here seaweed is both resilient and admonitory, making us aware of global warming’s rising sea levels.

Like pérez’s sculpture, Bore in the Darkness of Our Hair, Roberge’s 8 Days a Week is not about the artist being stuck but rather uses temporal estrangement (the self-portrait from thirty years ago, the seaweed from just a few years ago) to instate a response to cultural, social, and national stuckness. From Florida to Maine, Roberge’s piece claims an expansive American geography, and subtly suggests that in thirty years of awareness of the perils of global warming we have not moved forward in progress but regressed, or perhaps we circle back continuously. Seaweed itself, like the artist modeled in the self-portrait, is resilient. As Maine fisheries are predicted to decline with continued global warming, the harvesting of seaweed is already being touted as a path to save fishing jobs and generations-long traditions of earning a living seafaring on the ocean.

Pérez’s sculpture presents hair as a formal statement of beauty and thriving, and Roberge’s seaweed sculptured self-portraits suggest a similar ability to thrive despite challenges. While the Anthropocene ethos is human-centric and determined to consume the Earth without concern for future impacts, Life Forms suggests another way. Confronting stasis and perhaps the despondency of our national politics that refuses to care for the Earth and care for the vulnerable, these artworks look at our “stuck” place and wrest open paths forward for hope and survival.