The relationship between patriarchy and the manipulation of our environment can be seen in how we organize social classes and demand obedience through the ownership of invented habitats, i.e. who is allowed to live where and for how long, how much debt we are in and to whom, the forced imperative (by home owners’ associations or insurance companies) to keep well manicured lawns or to take down unsightly basketball hoops. These requirements of how we live reinforce the socialization of our race, class, and gender roles; between obligations to keep our living spaces to the standards of their owners/our fellow owners and the jobs we need to keep living in them, we are left with little time to confront the fact that we ourselves are owned by men more powerful than us and that we, in turn, own those of lesser privilege. These structures we have invented and take part in bring us great comfort in the face of everything we do not know.
Technology feeds the delusion that we have any power over nature. I, despite having a great deal of privilege, do not have much control over my living space because of my socioeconomic class or the safety of my body because of my gender, but I spend countless hours on the internet sifting through forestry and hydrology photo archives, researching methods of securing unsuitable environments in order to build housing, browsing public records to see how parcels are divided amongst owners, viewing the pseudo-organic shapes of suburbia via satellite images, and digging through real estate listings. Through my attempts at understanding the world by manipulating artifacts and identifying visual motifs, I feel a degree of comforting authority, just like anyone else who studies our environment.
Works like “Groin” and “Slopes” are diagrams of how we try to prevent nature from encroaching on our roadways or reshaping a naturally transient coastline that we have populated. “Earthwork” is a more obvious example than land ownership of how we weaponize our environment to perpetuate our species’ civil war. Collected and manipulated photos like “Trouble,” “More Trouble,” and “Potato Creek” are scientific artifacts from before America's mid-century suburban expansion that I borrowed from U.S. Forestry Service archives.
The images and instructions in "8 Men Raking Litter" are taken from U.S. Forestry service publications regarding methods of reinforcing road banks. The arrangement is meant to offer a new way into thinking about forestry and wilderness management by confusing the viewer.
Technology feeds the delusion that we have any power over nature. I, despite having a great deal of privilege, do not have much control over my living space because of my socioeconomic class or the safety of my body because of my gender, but I spend countless hours on the internet sifting through forestry and hydrology photo archives, researching methods of securing unsuitable environments in order to build housing, browsing public records to see how parcels are divided amongst owners, viewing the pseudo-organic shapes of suburbia via satellite images, and digging through real estate listings. Through my attempts at understanding the world by manipulating artifacts and identifying visual motifs, I feel a degree of comforting authority, just like anyone else who studies our environment.
Works like “Groin” and “Slopes” are diagrams of how we try to prevent nature from encroaching on our roadways or reshaping a naturally transient coastline that we have populated. “Earthwork” is a more obvious example than land ownership of how we weaponize our environment to perpetuate our species’ civil war. Collected and manipulated photos like “Trouble,” “More Trouble,” and “Potato Creek” are scientific artifacts from before America's mid-century suburban expansion that I borrowed from U.S. Forestry Service archives.
The images and instructions in "8 Men Raking Litter" are taken from U.S. Forestry service publications regarding methods of reinforcing road banks. The arrangement is meant to offer a new way into thinking about forestry and wilderness management by confusing the viewer.
All works by Megan Mjaatvedt are licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.