An Interview with Rebeca Méndez

A couple of months before we opened our main Environment showroom on Beverly Blvd in Los Angeles we paid a visit to Rebeca Méndez. Our architects had identified the main back wall as an ideal location for a supergraphic and recommended we’d meet with her.

Rebeca was just back from a month at an artist-in-residency in Iceland. She showed us her photography of the glacier lagoon, high definition video of banks of mist rolling over the highlands, and it was beautiful, but the series of work she showed shot on 16mm film –with a hand cranked Bolex camera older than herself– completely arrested our attention, in particular the one called At Any Given Moment, Grass, an infinite loop of a field of tall green barley grass forcefully blown by the wind, which becomes as meditative as staring into a campfire.

What was your first impression of the location?

“Jumping violently between utter joy and total horror. Here is this canvas measuring 8 feet by 22 feet that I can fill with my work (joy), but with a dimension disproportionate to my footage, which meant I would have to cut grass, cut in my own work (horror). Also, it was a great technological challenge with many variables, and all needed to align for us to succeed.”

Us?

Yes, for all parties involved this required a solid commitment early on in what basically was a great leap of trust in a favorable outcome. We tested and experimented at the location frequently, and together agreed what was needed for this to work, and made it happen. The projection has been running 7 days a week, 16 hours a day, with barely a hitch, for almost a year now. When my husband Adam and I drive by at night we often stop and just sit there, still in awe of the spectacle.

Not very environmentally sound of us, no?

My favorite bumper sticker of all time must be “Save the world, kill yourself.” Because how can you not leave a carbon footprint on this earth? A friend of mine, an artist in Amsterdam, Niels ‘Shoe’ Meulman who has his own discipline called Calligraffiti, just made a work for me inspired on this, called ‘Save the World.’ Anyone who believes my work environmentally suspect, I suggest they hold their breath for fifteen minutes (and become part of the solution), because it gets worse.

Oh?

In my work I see travel as a medium in itself. With my camera’s and my Adam I go to faraway places like Patagonia, the Atacama Desert, the Sahara and Iceland, but also places within driving distance like White Sands and Death Valley, in order to capture nature at its most elemental.

What drives you?

I am driven by the concept of ‘élan vital,’ developed by the French philosopher Henry Bergson. He described it as “the explosive internal force that life carries within itself,” which he claims animates all being.

My interest is in matter, in cycles and systems—specifically the forces and cross-rhythmic tensions that make natural phenomena emerge, where friction and tectonic flow generate new ways of experiencing the world. I explore a consciousness about the culture of nature we generate and hopefully inspire action towards a healthier relationship with our natural environment.

Can the arts play a role in sustainability?

Arts always mirror the great themes of their times, and the issue of sustainability is certainly one. In the arts our relationship to nature changes in perception. Where once our art of nature was the romantic sublime, then the manufactured landscape, now an environmental anxiety seems to rule the arts, with nature plotting the ultimate revenge.

‘Create Beauty. Respect the Planet’ is Environment’s motto.

That really resonates with me. We live in interesting times, where we are learning that –much like with our mortgages– we can no longer live of the capital of the earth, depleting its resources, but must live of its income, the harvest of its bounty. There is a rising school of thought within the sustainability movement around the notion of resilience, or the capacity of complex social ecological systems for living with change, and to rebuild and renew itself after disruption. I subscribe to that. I truly appreciate how Environment’s furniture embodies both the tenets of élan vital and resiliency that I hold so high in my work. Using reclaimed wood, that once was a tree and then stood as a barn in the Brazilian countryside for 50 years, and now lives on as a solid bed or table, good for use by another couple of generations. It is not another fad in the world of design you are adding, but a genuine contribution to the design of the world.

Read more about Rebeca: www.rebecamendez.com

At Any Given Moment, Grass installation at Environment's Los Angeles showroom