ARTIST STATEMENT
The images in We All Live Downwind are culled from daily headlines – inspired by global and grassroots struggles against the forces of privatization in the face of disaster capitalism. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein writes about the free market driven exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries saying, “the original disaster—the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane — puts the entire population into a state of collective shock”. The scenes in We All Live Downwind, have been carved out of dystopian landscapes in the aftermath of these events. On the surface, rubble hints at layers of oil and shale, cracked and bubbling from the earth below. Rising from another mound, rows of empty mobile homes bake beneath the summer sun. The bust of small towns left dry in the aftermath of supply and demand. In this place, only fragments of people remain, their mechanical gestures left tending to the chaos on auto. Reduced to survival, their struggle against an increasingly hostile environment goes unnoticed. Beyond the upheaval of production a bending highway promises never ending expansion – and that low rumble you hear to the west is getting louder.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Shanna Merola is a visual artist, photographer, and legal worker. Her sculptural photo-collages are informed by the stories of environmental justice struggles past and present. Travelling to EPA designated Superfund sites, she has documented the slow violence of deregulation – from her own neighborhood on the Eastside of Detroit, to Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens, and Love Canal, NY. In addition to her studio practice she has ten years of experience working in civil rights law through the National Lawyers Guild Detroit and San Francisco Chapters. Merola has been awarded studio residencies through MacDowell, Banff Centre for Arts + Creativity, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Foundation House, and Kala Institute of Art. She has received fellowships and grants through the Kresge Arts Foundation, Society for Photographic Education, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Generator Arts Accelerator, the Puffin Foundation, Bulk Space, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. Her collaborative projects and public interventions include Detroit Resists: A Digital Occupation of the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2016), Oil + Water: Photography in the Age of Disaster Economies with Kate Levy (2017) and Swan Song with Halima Afi Cassells at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2022-2023). Merola has shown her work in solo exhibitions both nationally and abroad at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea. She has held teaching appointments at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Wayne State University, the College for Creative Studies, and in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley in California.
© Shanna Merola