This exhibition features artists playing with signifiers of theatricality, hysteria, and humor in contemporary conversation regarding the notion of apocalypse. What are the varying scales of apocalypse? And most importantly, what might come after?

This exhibition series is organized by curators-in-residence Ashley Stull Meyers and Aurora Tang and is made possible by the University of Oregon Department of Art’s Center for Art Research and the Ford Family Foundation.

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Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World considers the ways in which we witness and re-order our rapidly changing environmental ecosystems. The three-part exhibition series engages Oregon artists in conversation about climate change as equal parts a beginning and an end, a noun and a verb, perpetually in flux.

Visual, sonic, and other creative works call for a reconsideration of established environmental legacies, iconographies, ideologies, and measures. Where once stood a well, now stands a solar panel. Where once there was the sound of rustling trees, now is the crackling of fire.

The exhibition title, taken from a book of essays by Barry Lopez, lingers on the possibility of fearlessness as a mode of generative resistance. By examining the human impulses toward witness and nostalgia, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World holds history and hope for the future in each hand.