Extinction Art, Climate Rhetoric, and the Work of Finding Presence
Debra Hawhee, Pennsylvania State University

To galvanize action in response to the climate crisis, it is insufficient to present findings; the task at hand is, rather, to find presence. Such is one of the main claims of A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Crisis is Changing Rhetoric. To extend that claim, and to further delineate the rhetorical potency of climate art, this talk will consider the extinction art of Andrea Bowers and Elizabeth Turk, two artists whose work finds presence in the face of species extinction. Bowers’s “Eco Grief Extinction Series” (acrylic paintings of birds and humans) and Turk’s “Tipping Point: Echoes of Extinction” (a set of sculptured bird vocalizations) meet extinction by foregrounding mood and silence respectively. They do so by—and help to theorize—the aesthetic and modal possibilities of mood and of silence, materializing presence in the context of decay, loss, and absence.