Max Liboiron is a mixed media artist and scholar. Lately, she has used dioramas, pinhole photographs, prints, drawings, digital art, installation and animation in her work. She strives to represent "nature" as the complex and inextricable relationships between people, social history, and the local environment.
She says: In the 1960s, when the
scale and severity of environmental degradation became apparent, art, film, and
literature imagined an apocalyptic end of the world, or at the very least, the
end of nature. Fifty years later, the end of the world has not arrived. Instead,
we live in a slow-moving apocalypse as environmental conditions worsen and where
nature is an ambiguous space where technology, industry, societies and
ecosystems intersect.
To describe such a present, Future Natural' uses the genre of science
fiction. This body of work imagines a future based in and on the present. It
includes narratives from three different environmental narratives, including the
confused, uncomfortable, and even violent grief that occurs as a result of the
loss of prior habitats, species, ecosystems, and ways of life; the exciting and
slick elements of a "culture of exuberance," where ecological risk and crisis
are seen as exciting opportunities for change; and a pragmatic optimism that
aims to integrate the natural world, cultures and social structures sustainably.
Max Liboiron received her MFA from State University of New York at Stony Brook, and BFA from Mount Allison, and is currently a PhD candidate in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her work has been in many solo and group exhibitions both in this country, Canada, and abroad including "The Dawson City Trash Project" at Klondike Institute Art Center, Dawson City, YK, Canada, Material Afterlife at the Urban Center for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI, Abundance at the Lawrence Alloway Memorial Gallery, Stony Brook, NY, and Salt-Winning: Equal to or Greater Than, a solo show planned for 2010 at the Oxygen Art Centre, Nelson, BC, Canada. Her awards include residencies from the Oxygen Art Center, Nelson, Canada; The Lower Eastside Printshop, NY, and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Canada, New York Sustainability Task Force, New York University, NY. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
