Em Rea and Kristen Neville Taylor

Kristen Neville Taylor: In 2018, you had a stint of residencies from This Will Take Time in California to a residency at MASS MoCA and others on the east coast. Once you got to RAIR, a main focus of your work became about the Superfund site and you became less interested in your original proposal. Can you talk about the process of planning for residencies and how you respond and make changes once you land in a place? 

Em Rea: For each of the residencies I attended last Summer I wrote initial proposals that reflected where I was at in my work at the time the applications were due (many months before). Of course, time passes and thoughts are developed, changed or forgotten which really influenced my recent making-as-response-to-place art making process. During that time, I moved from California to Massachusetts, back to California, and then to Philadelphia -- my body and mind were literally ping-ponging all over the place. At RAIR, I was able to feel settled for the first time in months. I was in residence  for about seven weeks total, and that made a HUGE difference in the work and research I was able to do. With all that time, I was able to really dig into the history of the site and to think through that as material and installation site for my work.

KNT: Your work operates on a spectrum of time from permanence on one end and ephemerality on the other. When we last spoke you said “either I want it to last for 100,000 years or I want to go away.” In what ways did you apply this principle of your practice in your time at RAIR? 

ER: RAIR and the the Metal Bank Superfund site, located to its south side, in particular, really got me thinking through the material expressions of time. At RAIR I was the exposed to the day-to-day labor, process, and intensity of waste disposal and recycling. It made object permanence all the more glaring and apparent to me. Now I can’t stop thinking every time I put something in the trash-- about how that is not the end of or death of that object -- it will keep being pushed around in some form for SO long, so much longer than I can fathom.

There are materials that last for very long periods of time (like resin, in this case pine rosin, which fossilizes to amber over thousands of years) and materials that decompose and return to the earth quickly (like organic plant life). For some of the smaller pieces I made at RAIR, I dipped plant clippings in pine rosin to preserve them. I liked the tension created between these preserved pieces of plants and the ones that were living and dying on the Superfund site itself . These little ‘beings’ frozen in time juxtaposed to others which were caught up in their own mortality.

This was also a way for me to think through the permanence but as it relates to land and water contamination on the site -- specifically contamination like the PCB (Polychlorinated biphenyls, an oil product) which had contaminated the land and water at the Superfund Site in the 1960’s. During their cleanup process, the EPA had to dig below the ground’s surface to remove a large portion of contaminated land and replace it with clean soil, keeping contaminants from leaching into the water table. Without human assistance, this process would have naturally taken thousands of years.  It’s interesting how human intervention was able to change the timeline so much. 

Systemic time was also a big element at this site. In my research I learned that it took almost ten years from when the contamination was discovered in the river to when remediations began. The hold-up was funding. The EPA’s Superfund Program has very limited funds -- formerly funded by taxes, the EPA now has to raise funds to clean up sites by sueing site owners or known parties responsible for the contamination. EPA was thus wrapped up in a ten year legal battle with the Metal Bank and its owners, who eventually filed for bankruptcy. Soil and water remediation is very VERY expensive!

KNT: You said there was an alienated feeling about the superfund site and its relationship between people and spaces. The choice of sharing the work at night and highlighting the specimens with red lighting amplified the detached quality you describe. How did you make choices about color and light and which specimens to highlight? 

ER: There is an eerie and sinister feeling at the site. You stand on that ground and you know something lethal was present there once. Some of it still seems to linger somewhere deep (you hope) below the surface. I remember looking at the dirt I had under my fingernails and reminding myself to resist the urge to bite. The site had been cleaned up, but it still really unnerved me.

In my installation I used red lights to illuminate signs of what was happening on the ground surface points of life that had returned after the remediation. These spotlights hung over spiderwebs, young plants, a pigeon egg that had fallen from the rafters, and a squirrel carcass. I chose the red lights for a few reasons: 1. Compared to other lights (blue, which attract night pollinators, and yellow that repel them) red lights are, according to my research, supposed to be the least harmful/disruptive to the environment of the Superfund site. 2. In making and titling the work I was considering “redshift,” which is a term that scientists use when determining if a celestial body is moving towards or away from the earth. Red means moving towards the earth and blue means moving away. My installation proposed the questions: are humans are moving towards greater habits of contamination, pollution, and irreversible damage or are we learning from sites like this one and moving towards greater planet wide health by improving remediation processes.  

I think the alienated feeling I get from the Superfund site also comes from this sense of unease, unknowing, and foreboding. Superfund sites are not widely discussed among the public, at least in my experience, yet they impact innumerable human and non-human lives. And unfortunately the people most often impacted by these sites and their contaminants-- devastating health effects (cancers, lymphomas, birth defects, sterility, etc.)-- are largely low-income people and people of color. Superfund sites are yet another place where systemic oppression and neglect become visible.

KNT: It was interesting to learn that your father is a biochemist and your mother is a kindergarten teacher. Although not an exact parallel, there is a similarity between the work you ended up doing at RAIR and the work your father did as a biochemist. Can you talk about his work and when you realized that you shared a common objective?  

ER: While I was working on this project I went to my Dad for advice on Superfund sites and to learn what might be happening with the soil and plant life there. He is the #1 plant/science expert in my life. In the early 90’s he and a couple other scientists accidentally discovered this gene in arabidopsis (“mouse ear cress”) plants that could be altered to become hyperaccumulators for heavy metals (soil contaminants like mercury, cadmium, etc), making them able to pull in contaminants through their roots. These plants can then be cut and disposed of in various ways, making them ideal for bioremediation cleanup projects like what took place on the Superfund site. Unfortunately the plant he studied wasn’t used in the Superfund cleanup, because it’s unable to extract PCB’s, but but it was still cool to get to talk to my Dad about his work and discover where our interests intersect. 

KNT:  Your residency coincided with a survey of the Superfund site performed by the EPA which happens every 4 years. How fortuitous! You had a chance to speak with them about the site. What kinds of questions did you ask them and how were you inquiries received? 

ER: Yeah! I was super lucky to get to run into them while they were out in the field collecting their data. They were very open to my questions. I asked about what they were looking for when visiting sites like this -- they said they were there to checking the height of the soil/ground to ensure that it was not sinking and thus re-exposing buried contaminants. They said they were also monitoring plant species growing in the field. I was told that the plants in the field not only provide the soil with a root structure (helping to keep it from sliding into the river), but that they also reintroduce the site to its pre-contamination, pre-human environment-- encouraging birds and other critters to come and nest. I was struck by this idea that land is able to return to a “before state”. Like was there a set point in time where this land was at its most “truest” state? It seems pretty arbitrary. How is this point in time determined? Was is before industry moved into the area? Was it when this land was home to and cared for by the Lenni Lenape people (who have since been pushed out many miles from this riverside)? Or was it before humans inhabited the site? Part of the process of ecologically “returning to” a point in time in this land’s life was planting the field of “native” wild grasses. While monitoring the site, the EPA says that they are looking for “non-native” plant species that “don’t belong” in this environment. They keep the invasive plant ratio at less than 10% per plant mass. I was struck here again by markers of time and the designation of “native” or “naturalized” plant species “non-native” and “invasive.”  This rigid terminology and segregation is troubling and is something I’ve been working through on a new project. 

KNT: The final piece was shared with a select group of people and kept very intimate. Can you talk about the value of creating an experience like this that’s focus isn’t on the general public but rather privileges a specific community?

ER: Oh man, I really wish I had figured out a way to invite local community members -- looking back on this process I think it would have been an incredible opportunity to engage with the people who actually live near this site. I think that artmaking can offer an enormous value to a community especially site-specific work like this one, by engaging with the people that live in and around the site. Places cannot be divorced from their people and communities. I think that it’s important for residents living near a Superfund site to be aware of it’s status and know about any risks it might pose to their community.  I don’t know that any of this is actually happening? However, it was a bit tricky to figure out how to safely host people at RAIR afterdark, we had to keep this trial run intimate. But I was able to invite some local friends to visit/ participate in my red light installation. In total, only about 5 folks were able to come and walk through the site with me. I drew up a couple of maps with some information about the items and beings that were highlighted with the redlights. People used the maps to go on a tour through the warehouse and out to the river’s edge. I ended up doing a kind of guided tour -- telling the story of the site as we all walked together. It was very quiet and eerie out there after dark, our path was illuminated 13 small red spotlights dangling from the rafters and by a few bike lights lining the path out into the field. My favorite part of the experience was the conversations and questions from my friends -- most people didn't know much about Superfund sites, or even that there was one so close to our homes. Some had grown up near other Superfund sites and shared their experiences of them, recounting the unnerving quality of those spaces.

KNT: A large part of your practice is working outside directly with landscape and place. How has being in the space of grad school changed your practice and what are you working on now? 

ER: Being so familiar with working site-specifically up until this point has made the shift to working within an institutional framework a bit of an interesting new challenge. I’ve been working through a few different projects since I started school in September. In one, I’ve been researching the “Penn Treaty Elm”, an elm tree associated with the  mythical story about a treaty signed between William Penn and the Chief Tannemend of the Lenni Lenape people. I’ve read speculations the treaty never existed-- so the elm tree that lives right outside my studio on campus, said to be a cloned descendant of the the “Penn Treaty Elm”, is an ominous presence for me.

Another project I’m currently working on involves the movement of plants and landscapes on a global scale. I’ve been researching the narrow lense of invasive North American and European plants species in Tokyo, Japan-- a group of other students and I were lucky enough to get funding to go there this Spring for a photography class. I’m not sure, yet, how these two projects and the research I’ve been doing will manifest into artworks. 

And after I wrap these projects up I think I’m ready to move away from the plant realm and into something else -- still definitely space related, but coming at it from a different angle.