PENUMBRA Members Gallery | Matthew López-Jensen
You Are Getting Warmer
“HEAT! HEAT! HEAT!”
“WATER HERE!”
“ABOUT TO BLOOM!”
“HEY! SUGAR!”
“WE HAVE WARM STONES!”
Perhaps we should imagine a forest as a kind of botanical strip mall with neon signs everywhere. The glowing signs are for the visitors; insects, amphibians, birds, anything that can see or sense heat. If you are a bug that eats certain leaves (or a bird that eats bugs that eats certain leaves) then the shape of a leaf glowing against the cool sky is as iconic as a restaurant logo: ASH, OAK, ELM, MCDONALDS, SONIC, RED LOBSTER. A garden, designed by and for humans probably feels like an amusement park, with incredible displays, confusing juxtapositions, and constant variation.
Looking at a landscape with a thermal imaging camera feels like being in a hallucinatory state. Everything is bright, vivid, and dripping with color. The technology makes me aware of how subtle shifts in temperature can transform entire realities for certain species. When we hear how climate change is adding point-something degrees each year to this sea or that tundra it is easy to shrug it off. But apply that point-something to a world where every decision is linked to temperature variations and you have instantly transformed an animal’s entire world and how they survive.
The Great Barrier Reef. The Everglades. Gates of the Arctic.
Now I see sun baked asphalt roads as impassable strips of molten lava. Not because I’m six years old and playing a game with my friends, but because that is what they are to a salamander. Crossing means death. If I am a honeybee the first thing I do is memorize the heat signatures of my surroundings so I can navigate on autopilot. However, if a tree limb falls or a human drops a boulder in the middle of a field I might fly around for hours disoriented.
The photographs produced by a thermal imaging camera are hardly photographs. They are colorized data. They are settings and pallets, reminiscent of cyanotypes, maybe, or nineteenth-century salt prints. There is no “bumble bee” setting or “hummingbird” setting because we don’t yet know exactly how their brains translate heat into information. We don’t know if they also visualize other frequencies, radiations, or wavelengths. Something tells me that our human way of seeing light, with only two eyes, translates to a worldview that is basic at best.
Artist Bio
Matthew López-Jensen is an interdisciplinary artist whose rigorous explorations of landscape combine walking, collecting, photography, mapping and extensive research. His projects investigate the relationships between people and local landscapes. He was a recent artist-in-residence with the NYC Urban Field Station, is a Citizen Pruner and a part of the New York City Urban Forest Task Force. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in photography and has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts in support of site-specific, landscape projects. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, among other institutions. He teaches at Fordham University and Parsons School of Design, lives and works in the Bronx. He received his MFA in photography from the University of Connecticut and BA in political science and fine art from Rice University.
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