TUVALU IS SINKING. In a few decades, the island nation in the South Pacific might be mostly waves. Many of us know this from the internet, the island’s submersion a de facto symbol of climate change, much like starving polar bears stranded on floating icebergs. The artist David Hartt knows about Tuvalu because he went there in 2015 to make a film called Adrift and to witness firsthand the effects of rising sea levels. He’s traveled to swamplands in Florida and to Jamaica, where the artist Frederic Church sketched plein air studies. And he found the exact location in Ohio where the landscape painter Robert Duncanson set his easel for Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River (1851). For more than a decade, he’s made artworks—photographs, essayistic films, sculptural and sound installations—that examine place and history.
Visiting these diverse, far-flung locations isn’t about ecotourism or metaphorical trophy hunting. Hartt’s researchdriven art leads him to crossroads where colonial-inflected landscapes meet rapidly changing environmental and political conditions. He weaves together interconnecting, unsettled narratives, drawing viewers into a delicate web that only appears fragile. “One mode of working is trying to engage in dimensionalized problems
