Not Us Painting

As an artist I try to make sense of life through a visual means— Over the last ten years, my work has considered our relationship to other animals and the earth, exploring ideas such as communication, compassion, beauty and sustainability. I have also explored through my artwork my own hearing loss through my research with sound. The fragility of life and its ever-changing nature, both beautiful and tragic, sometimes ugly, compel me as an artist to explore this duality. After receiving cochlear implants last year, for my rather severe hearing loss, as part of my therapy I started listening to books. One of the first books I just by chance listened to was Naomi Klein’s book “This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs. the Climate”. This book was the catalyst to start working on a series of artworks about how society changes and how we can cope with such a dramatic systemic problem as climate change. With our ability to communicate so rapidly we have set in place the ability to transform our behaviors and attitudes in a way never before possible. One series I worked on was what I consider a “backward collaboration in time” with the writings, poetry and short stories, that were left by my mother, Carla Sweet Chlouber and her father, my grandfather, Arthur Carlos Sweet. After my mother unexpectedly passed away we found her unpublished poetry and short stories along with my grandfather’s unpublished writings. Not wanting their work to be lost I decided to work with it through my own artwork and also as a way to cope with the loss of my mother. I came across their own grief of losing their parents—it was then I could see a chain that extended back to the beginning and that we are never alone in these feelings. I was born in Stillwater, Oklahoma in 1961. During my early years my family lived in Arizona on the Navaho and Hopi reservations, Oklahoma and Nebraska. I have a deep appreciation for native American cultures, they have deeply influenced me as an artist and my view of the world. There is a timeless, quiet quality one of strength and love for nature that I find through having grown up there. To me culture, how we shape it, and all that we create through that is what will enable us to thrive and live in harmony with each other and the planet we live on, earth.