Join us The Dubois Center at UNC Charlotte Center City as we host an artist talk for Earthbound Riches, which features work from Caroline Hatfield and Stacy Kranitz. This exhibition will be on view from August 20-October 29, 2021 at The Projective Eye Gallery.
Coal has become a complicated and controversial topic. After millennia of being prized for its abundance and combustibility, the past century has seen it gradually smolder by the winds of alternative technologies, environmental protection politics, and regional socioeconomic disparities. Although a nonrenewable natural resource, the industry surrounding coal controls four-times the amount of the world’s energy share than renewables. It employs seven million people worldwide (2014) and more than 50,000 people in the United States, with well over half of those workers living in the Appalachian region (2019), and is responsible for 72% of total greenhouse gas emissions.
Earthbound Riches centers on this controversial resource turned commodity and presents two contemporary artists whose life experiences and creative works intersect with coal at different points.
Caroline Hatfield is originally from eastern Tennessee and teaches sculpture at Mississippi State University. Through drawings, installations, and sculptures, she explores “. . . the concept of landscape as medium, rather than subject.” Coal slag has been a recurring material in Hatfield’s work due to its black otherworldly appearance, brittle malleability, and specific geographic identity. “One can easily reduce coal to a material with an assigned value based on its usefulness to human activity,'' writes Hatfield. “However, as an artist, the aesthetic and material qualities of coal strike me as independently captivating. It has a gold-like richness and depth to it that is sublime. It is lustrous – even mystical. And, having thoroughly enchanted the economy and industries of our time, it is a precious substance. The commodification of which is obscured and glorified, resulting in hard seen disparities and consequences, though there is no clearer glimpse than in Appalachia.”
Stacy Kranitz was born in Kentucky and currently lives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. Although she works within the documentary tradition, her photographs are honest about their inherent shortcomings. They are rare glimpses into Appalachian culture from an artist so voluntarily immersed in her surroundings. In 2009, Kranitz began work on As It Was Give(n) To Me, an archive of collected images, texts, and objects that traces exploration and extraction in central Appalachia. Images included in this exhibition were selected from that archive and capture the culture built around the Appalachian coal industry. Ultimately, Kranitz strives to breakdown pre-existing notions of Appalachia, many of which were originally spurred by decades of documentary photography. “In every culture we have histories that are repressed and buried,” writes Kranitz. “The one we know is not often the real history.”
Photo by Stacy Kranitz