Landman for the Planet website

We believe there mineral rights owners out there who are open to investing their mineral rights and/or royalties in a just climate future. Oil and gas royalty owners earn about $22B each year from extraction. If just 1% of that amount, equivalent to $220 million, were deployed to support a just, sustainable, and desirable future, think of what can be achieved. By fostering communication and collaboration, we can build a positive, collective legacy.

Landman for the Planet is a resource for those who want to support front-line communities and those already building a just climate future, who want to share insights and make collaborative investments, and for those who wish to place their mineral rights in the hands of those committed to the climate future.

Exhibitions:

LaMama Galleria, 6.24 - 7.2.23, New York

Mineral rights are not easy assets to manage and even giving them away can be a fraught process. Landman for the Planet is assembling a trusted community of lawyers (so many lawyers), accountants, mineral owners, activists, and front-line community members to guide this project as it strives, however quixotically, to become a force for a desirable future.

ATWTH project website

Upcoming Exhibition: Unsettling Matter, Gaining Ground at the Carnegie Museum of Art, August 19, 2023–January 7, 2024

Year: 2020-ongoing

Medium: mineral rights, law, bureaucracy

Size: 3 acres (width x length) x 4,000 miles (depth)

Edition: 1000 mineral properties

Copyright 2020

Were we to burn all known fossil fuel reserves, we could expect an average temperature increase of 9.5 degrees Celsius (17 degrees Fahrenheit), a result incompatible with sustaining nearly every living thing. The best option is to leave fossil fuel in the ground.

I own three acres of minerals in Creek County, Oklahoma, an inheritance from a great aunt. Oil and gas developers have recently expressed interest in the property, but I cannot stomach the prospect of being directly complicit in the fossil fuel economy. If the neighboring mineral owners agree to drilling, I can be forced to participate. All the Way to Hell is a way to create options where none now exists.

All the Way to Hell is a participatory, monumental, site-specific land-based work that converts 1000 individual gestures into a new form of environmental resistance at the intersection of property law, fossil fuel business practice, and bureaucracy. I plan to transfer my mineral rights to 1000 people. Because it costs developers just as much to acquire 500 acres as it does much smaller properties, this aggressive fragmentation of the property will inhibit fossil fuel interest in it. Contractors hired by drilling companies are required to research land title, contact mineral owners, negotiate and execute lease agreements, and register those agreements locally for each mineral property they intend to drill. The aim is to make these mineral rights as inconvenient and expensive to acquire as possible.

All the Way to Hell is a model for resistance in any U.S. region vulnerable to fossil fuel development. I am designing the project to be a platform for large-scale, distributed noncooperation. The new owners of these tiny mineral properties can form the foundation for a 100-year sit-in.

This project examines and exploits some of the unique features of U.S. private property ownership. Property rights extend to heaven (ad coelum) and to hell (ad inferos). The 1862 Homestead Act granted property owners mineral rights to encourage western expansion. With the advent of aviation, federal law redefined ad coelum as 400 feet of airspace. Mineral rights extend, at least, in theory, to the center of the earth. A property’s air, surface (land), and mineral rights can be severed and transferred, traded, or sold separately. As a result, property owners can end up owning the surface land but not the minerals beneath and property owners can hold the minerals without owning the surface land. In all states, mineral rights supersede surface rights. Mineral ownership may be the most powerful form of private property in the U.S.

If the protest fails and the 1000 mineral properties are drilled (through a legal process called forced pooling), the developer will have to compensate owners and pay them their share of the royalties. The 1000 mineral owners will remain an administrative burden for the life of the well.

Participation in this artwork and the purchase of mineral rights will support the legal and filing costs associated with ownership transfer and the build-out of this work to other regions.

I invite you to join me as a collaborator, as a buyer of my mineral rights, and as a supporter of activist art. If you own mineral rights, I am happy to share what I have learned.

Kill Plot Home Goods is about the technological mediation of our relationships with one another and nature. These digital images are based on hunters’ schematics of their hunting grounds. The schematics show how they craft the land to attract deer, guide them through their feed plots, and ultimately to the kill plots where the animals are dispatched. Game cameras surveil the entire enterprise.

These images are turned into jacquard patterns, which are, in turn, made into soft home goods. The jacquard loom was the mechanical inspiration for early computers which thus enabled wide-spread surveillance, predictive algorithms, etc. The home goods reestablish intimacy with social and ecological violence.

Vault is an installation comprised of several whitewashed adobe figures. Inside each figure is a single American chestnut seed. The figures will dissolve over time and perhaps support the germination of a new tree. The American chestnut is functionally extinct in its native range (including the Catskills). A genetically engineered American chestnut, developed in Syracuse, will be released into the forests within two years and it will need unaltered trees with which to breed. Conceptually this work sets up the conditions for a small chestnut orchard to emerge and breed with the engineered trees for a few seasons before the unaltered trees succumb to the blight. The adobe figures safeguard seeds that will become unaltered trees that are, in time, certain to perish. Their offspring, with an assist from science, time, and luck, may yet reclaim the forest.

Concrete and steel

7ft x 2 ft x 1.5 ft

The Compact is three seven-foot tall cast concrete figures that enlist Cycladic, Greek, and 3D-scanned female forms to examine the compression of individual agency over millennia and our more contemporary assent to the myriad ways we are surveilled, measured, and archived. The figure is made from clearly defined parts loosely held by two threaded rods and patches of mortar. The rebar matrixes that reinforce the concrete reference the inscription of gridded systems on our bodies and our actions. 

Artefactual relocate female resistance. The work enlists Cycladic, 3D-scanned and appropriated female forms to excavate female power through shifts in scale and materials. They are fully encased, erased, and discordantly ancient and contemporary. 

Foam, shrink wrap, posts.

Size: 7 figures 2 ft x 7 ft x 1.5 ft positioned in .3 acres (~13,000 sq ft)

Grid drawing in a hayfield. Two visible layers of intervention on top of four centuries of European settlement in the Hudson Valley. A reinterpretation of some of Thomas Cole’s concerns.

Installation: plastic wrap, t-posts

Size; 1.3 acres

The work is an interpretation of a small contemporary American chestnut tree orchard. The fence inhibits deer from browsing on young trees and the tree protectors shield the absent tree from rodents and agricultural spraying. This structure is the minimal systemization required to protect a species that once thrived in this area on its own.

The American chestnut is “functionally extinct.” Since the 1980s there have been several efforts to revive the American chestnut through hybridization and, more recently and more successfully, genetic intervention. The chestnut’s revival seems quaint, but this specific case tells us a lot about what is required to take the long, multi-generational view to pull a species back from the brink. Species extinction and climate change invert our cultural understanding of nature and resilience. For many species, there will be little resilience without large scale, systematic intervention. Can our grid patterns and input schedules adequately substitute for and eventually reanimate natural processes over the long-term? What are the challenges of inspiring nostalgia for something no one remembers? What other losses--other forms of life, languages, cultures--will we be compelled to accept because we cannot do otherwise? How are we likely to interpret their loss then?

Posts, monofilament, acrylic tubes

26 ft x 6ft x 22 ft

The work itself is three 10-foot squares plots surrounded by an 8 to 9-foot tall fence made of t-posts and tinted monofilament. The installation is an unambiguous artwork inscribed in the forest that by its shape and materials alludes to science, gardening, cultivation, and management. There is no gate or passageway into the plots. The viewer is excluded from the plot’s interior but for a 12-18-inch gap between the forest floor and the bottom of the fencing. The viewer is left to consider what is protected and why. Inside the plots, the forest will be for the most part unmolested by both deer and humans for the duration of the work.

Posts, monofilament

22 ft x 9 ft x 22 ft

Excerpt of photographic series of wrapped plush toys on a Catskills family vacation. 

Digital image series 

5 in x 7 in

A tree with bare roots suspended over a bucket of water. Viewers can give the tree a drink by pulling on handles that lift the bucket via a ridiculous but interpretable pully system. Two actors are required, one on each side, requiring some minimal social organization is to accomplish the task.

installation: tree, bucket, water, lumber, cording, hardware

8 ft x 8 ft x 3 ft

By playing with the plane, surface, and unspoken invitations to interaction, this work undermines expectations about what one finds on and how one interacts with objects on a white wall. This space is no more contrived than environments we think of as more natural.

Framed cabbage plants, funnel, vinyl tubing, potting soil, watering can, water

Size variable

Transpiration, 2017, site specific installation: tree limbs, hardware, plastic wrap, twine

Transpire:

1. To come about; happen or occur.

2. To become known; come to light.

3. To give off vapor containing waste products, as through animal or plant pores.

Origin: from Latin trans – ‘through’ + spirare ‘breathe’

The work makes visible the impact of human activity on nature as it unfolds over one year.  Three living trees are encased shrink wrap. Will the generative force of the trees overcome the constraints of the plastic? Will the plastic attenuate or even suffocate the trees?

Installation Locations: Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, New York

Excerpt from News from the Office of the President, Purchase College, SUNY, September 25, 2017, by Kristi McKee

PLASTIC-WRAPPED TREES TEST NATURE AND DRAW ATTENTION TO HUMAN INTERACTION WITH THE PLANET.

Transpire is a sculptural experiment using flora and time to test the limits of nature. Evans has wrapped three trees with bright white marine-grade shrinkwrap to see if they’ll survive under duress. The species chosen—Hawthorne, Crap Apple, and White Pine—are hardy for this environment. 

The trees continue to draw water and nutrients from the soil, but the ability to excrete oxygen as the waste product of photosynthesis is interrupted. The stress they’ll endure is the inability to get rid of waste. Essentially, they’re unable to exhale, thus the name Transpire.  

“They’re not going to thrive, but I’m more interested in survival. This is about globally, our relationship to the planet,” she explains.  

A sound component will project the trees’ health. Using analog sap-flow data, which monitors water movement in the trees, passersby will hear whether or not the trees are struggling, not unlike an EKG. 

Last April, Evans found inspiration in a science-based art lecture given by the researcher, writer, and editor Heather Davis. “It was fascinating,” and appealed to her previous career in science. 

After studying theology as an undergrad, Evans earned her PhD in economic sociology and spent years in the research field—she worked for a think tank that helped scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs find each other and build companies based on university research. 

Evans arrived at Purchase with only drawing, painting, and printmaking in her portfolio, but she had a strong desire to explore additional media and techniques. She was drawn to both the facilities available here and the faculty’s willingness to engage. 

“I’ve had tremendous conversations with people I’ve never taken a class with. That’s how I ended up here [at installation],” she says. “They don’t care that I didn’t come with the sculpture imprimatur. I had an idea and they were willing to help me figure it out.” 

From her unique perspective as both a scientist and now an artist, Evans believes both are very similar. “’What question are you asking?’ is the first creative step for both. Just like artists, scientists are trying to make sense out of chaos.” 

Evans views one of her greatest challenges ahead to be the art world’s perception of a non-traditional student. “People think you’re a weekender, or a dabbler. But I’m dead serious.” 

Evans will continue to monitor the Transpire project and hopes nature will endure. She says time is the principle medium in this work, and time it will be that tells.

Nos. 199-204 in a Series of 3, 2016, painted steel table, transfer prints, digital prints, clay tokens, glass jars, tamper proof tape, cardboard boxes, ruler, stainless steel tray, and 412 survey responses, 6 x 7 x 4 feet

The work converts the digital capture of an unquantifiable want into a physical artifact.  The clay tokens, in seven shapes, are the origins of math, record keeping, and written language, specifically cuneiform. Clay tokens were used for 5,000 years before the innovation of making impressions of token shapes into clay tablets. It took a long time to disembody information.