Ecofeminism, Projective Imagination and The Scale of Installation Art: reading Connie Zehr's Solar Circumstance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/2974-6620/uon.n22-24_2025_pp300-319Keywords:
Arte ed ecologia, Eco-femminismo, Arte e attivismo, Connie Zehr, Installazione, Scala, Disegno, Diagramma, Rachel CarsonAbstract
The paper analyzes Connie Zehr's exhibition Solar Circumstance, held in the fall of 1975 at the Salvatore Ala Gallery in Milan, Italy, an artificially lit environment of sand and clay objects. By a close reading of the artist's “visual diaries,” the analysis explores the sources and mechanisms of Zehr's ecological discourse, fueled by her reading of Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us and a feminist writing practice dating back to her involvement with the Womanspace environment in Los Angeles. Particular attention is given to the sequences drawn in the notebooks, which develop the motif of concentric circles (drawn from a vision of waves on Lake Garda) into diagrams that trigger the environmental expansion of the installation and were the basis for some of the drawings executed in parallel with the ephemeral environment. Using the concept of projective imagination, Solar Circumstance can be interpreted in the tension realized between the scale of the artist's work and that of the cosmological, oceanographic, and ecological reflections that fuel it.
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