Eco-Social #15: Landscapes in Pain Kristen Neville Taylor & Roxane Pemar

RSVP today for this special tour, presentation and brown-bag lunch (BYO Lunch)

About the Program:

This event will start with a tour of the solo exhibition by Kristen Neville Taylor “Come Into View” (on view from Sept 27 – Nov 1, 2025). Come into View is a multimedia installation that incorporates materials and stories collected from field visits to the Delaware Bay in Southern New Jersey to explore how we understand time, memory, and resilience in a changing climate. Through a video portrait, glass breath forms, and text, the exhibition explores how horseshoe crabs model collectivity and alternative ways of being in time. Influenced by Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, the work also reflects on the quiet, accumulative impacts of environmental harm—those that unfold invisibly across generations, perpetuated by dominant narratives that shape what we choose to see, remember, and value.

After the tour we will hear a presentation by the artist Roxane Permar who is visiting from the Shetland Islands in Scotland. Pemar will share about her Landscape in Pain which is an ongoing project which forms the heart of a multi-layered visual and social response to construction of the industrial scale Viking Energy Wind Farm in Shetland, whose landscape has been in a constant state of injury since 2020. It is a collection of digital drawings and films which Permar has been making since March 2021 in response to the on-going construction of one of the largest onshore wind farms in Europe, Viking Energy Wind Farm, on Shetland’s Mainland, including the ongoing construction of related infrastructure and new wind farm developments.

Bios

Kristen Neville Taylor is a Philadelphia artist whose diverse practice combines drawing, sculpture, and glass which converge playfully in installation style environments. Her work considers the impact of the stories we tell about nature calling attention to the systems and events that establish definitions and shape public perception of the environment. Taylor has organized several exhibitions including Landscape Techne at Little Berlin, The Usable Earth at the Esther Klein Gallery, and she co-curated Middle of Nowhere in the Pine Barrens. In 2019, she co-founded The Green Sun, a multifaceted project focused on the intersection of art and policy as they relate to the history of energy, energy democracy and possible energy futures. Taylor is the recipient of the Pew Fellowship, Laurie Wagman Prize in Glass, a RAIR Recycled Artist-in-Residence, and a Penn Program for the Environmental Humanities Artist-in-Residence. In 2024, she was awarded the NJ Coastal Management Community-Based Art Grant and will exhibit Come into View at Wheaton Arts & Cultural Center in the Fall of 2025.

Roxane Permar is based in the Shetland Islands, Scotland. She works with people through creative engagement, participation and collaboration using a range of media, including digital drawing, film, sound, textiles and photography. Her projects are often inter-generational and cross-cultural and span the northern and Arctic regions. The geopolitical consequences of contemporary societal threats, particularly climate crisis and nuclear disaster, including the impact and fears these can cause, underpin her long term projects, Landscape in Pain and Cold War Projects, a collaboration with artist Susan Timmins. She is currently working on a new transdisciplinary project, Northern Connections: Engaging young people in rural Arctic societies in building sustainability across borders, with artists and scientists from universities in Norway, Finland, and Shetland. She has been teaching throughout her career and since 2001 she has been a part-time lecturer in Shetland, currently based at the Centre for Island Creativity at UHI Shetland (University of the Highlands and Islands) where she is programme Leader for the Masters degree course in Art and Social Practice.

Host or Publisher Eco-Social Salon, Site-Seeing, and Screening Series