Opening on Friday night at 5pm; artist talk at 7pm
Viewing hours Saturdays 2 – 7pm; Closing April 4
Steve Rowell’s NATURAL STATE is a multi-screen video installation documenting four climate research stations across Minnesota’s upper-Midwest biomes: bog, mixed and conifer forest, oak savannah, and prairie. At each site, scientists are actively simulating futures: accelerating warming, manipulating biodiversity, stress-testing ecosystems against conditions that don’t yet exist. The four sites are Itasca Biological Station, Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve, Cloquet Forestry Center, and Marcell Experimental Forest, where active experimental protocols and their instruments are rendered visible: warming chambers, hexagonal biodiversity plots, hydrophones, and whole-bog manipulation rigs.
NATURAL STATE asks what it means to archive a living ecosystem being engineered to survive its own end. Three of the four sites are stewarded by the University of Minnesota. Marcell Experimental Forest sits on federal U.S. Forest Service land and operates in partnership with the Department of Energy and Sandia National Laboratories, a pairing that underscores both the historic entanglement of environmental research and national defense, and the current administration’s active erasure of federal climate data. Rowell’s installation pairs observational / experimental film and point cloud animation with maps, manuals, and field ephemera, framing the material culture of ecosystem science alongside its political stakes.
Bio
Steve Rowell is a human artist and educator who works with photography, moving image, sound, maps, and spatial relations. His research-based practice investigates terrains of perception, nonhuman intelligence, extinction, and technology, exploring the landscape as a site of political imagination. Steve contextualizes the morphology of the built environment with the surrounding medium of Nature, appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist.
He holds an MFA with Distinction from the University of Oxford and a BA in Studio Art from the University of Texas. He has collaborated with SIMPARCH (Chicago, 2003-2009), The Office of Experiments (London, 2009-present), and The Center for Land Use Interpretation (Los Angeles, 2001-2013). Born in Houston, Steve has been based in Los Angeles, Oxford, Berlin, Washington, D.C., and Chicago over the past twenty years. Currently, he lives in Minneapolis, where he works at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design as a researcher and educator.
He is also the founder of Planetary Spatial LLC, an ethical geospatial media company creating immersive representations of fragile biomes. Fusing conceptual landscape practice with advanced geospatial technologies, the company transforms remote sensing data into living archives of ecological change. As part of this, he is also building Planetary Futures Lab, a hybrid research-and-studio lab at MCAD that translates remote-sensing and climate data into cinematic, XR, and public-facing spatial narratives.
For more: https://steverowell.com/NATURAL-STATE