Artist(s)

Mahnoor Raza

Katie Ho

Mile Vilke

Artist Statement

While listening to the stories we recorded in Saranac Lake, many of them, understandably, fell on the grimmer side. One story in particular, however, ended with the speaker saying to “do what makes you happy” (interpreted as our project title: Do What You Love), and climate solutions will follow. Other stories spoke about their childhood experiences in nature, and how they’ve seen the climate change as they’ve grown older. We pieced together words from these stories to record two poems, backdropped by chatter from a sunny day on our university quad.

This project evokes childlike creativity and imagination by drawing on the aesthetics of children’s drawings. The multi-modal nature of our project represents a fusion of the real, “adult” world and the imagined, “childlike,” with both the physical and digital elements of this piece leaning into the playfulness of imperfecktion. By having the archival cherry-picking footage interact with the hand-drawn animation, and then projecting the video onto the canvas—featuring lopsided clay borders, glued-on wildflowers, and childlike drawings—we tried to blur the lines between whimsy and pragmatism, suggesting the radical potential of joy and storytelling as a climate solution.