UA News

Photographer Judy Natal explores designed environments that were built with nature and sustainability in mind.

Biosphere 2 is a tool of discovery for artists as well as scientists.

Columbia College Chicago photography professor and Biosphere 2 artist-in-residence Judy Natal has found the 3.18-acre enclosed glass and space-age-steel-frame structure to be a unique laboratory for her special kind of creative work.

Equipped with her Chicago-made, 1970s vintage Deardorff 8 x 10 field camera, Natal will be returning to the University of Arizona's Biosphere 2 in January to continue work on an ambitious, large-scale art project called "Future Perfect."

Natal's photographic project began at a site called the Springs Preserve at Las Vegas, Nev., in January 2007, and evolved in 2008 to include Biosphere 2 near Oracle, Ariz., and the violently volcanic island country of Iceland.

"In Future Perfect, I photograph nature as it is today, inseparable from us, and like us, in turmoil," Natal said in describing the project on a page on Biosphere 2's Web site. "I examine how distinctions are blurring between natural environments and human-made landscapes as we recycle our longing for nature in its pristine state into models defined by science and technology, in tandem with humankind's past experiences and future need to create alternate worlds."

"The Springs Preserve in Las Vegas is about designing nature, Biosphere 2 is about controlling nature, and Iceland is about asking what comes after nature," Natal said in an interview at Biosphere 2 last March.

Natal said she is fascinated by the desert "as metaphor of an extreme environment teetering between extinction and sustainability."

After completing a Las Vegas project that resulted in her 2006 book, "Neon Boneyard Las Vegas A-Z," she was drawn to the Springs Preserve, a historical and cultural attraction three miles away from the Las Vegas Strip.

A public-private collaboration between the Las Vegas Valley Water District and Springs Preserve Foundation was in the process of transforming the 180-acre, biologically rich Mojave Desert site into a showcase cultural institution that Natal describes as "an example of visionary leadership for a sustainable future."

"That got me to thinking how people are building environments that ultimately appear natural and how, through the chaos of construction, people fabricate these natural environments."

Natal first visited Biosphere 2 as a tourist in June 2007, a few weeks before the UA assumed management of the facility through its College of Science.

"I had my little digital camera with me and began taking snaps, and realized ‘Oh my gosh, I've got to come back here!'"

She wrote a proposal to B2 Institute director Pierre Meystre and Biosphere 2 assistant director Chris Bannon that convinced them she was a serious artist who wanted to add Biosphere 2 to her Future Perfect project. They invited Natal to be Biosphere 2's first artist-in-residence.

The position allows her to work "the way I prefer to work, where I can work everyday for weeks, uninterrupted, really focusing on the ideas I have," she said.

During her month-long stay at Casita Village, the on-site campus housing, last March, Natal began taking photographs of the Biosphere 2 dome at 6:30 a.m., and at half-hour intervals through the rest of the day.

"It's a pretty remarkable experience because you never stand in one place long enough to really see something like this. But when you do, you see all kinds of lens aberrations happening with the light, and the colors going from warm to cool to warm again," Natal said.

"This facility is such a beautiful structure – the architecture and engineering and design make it a huge light modulator both inside and out. It's fabulous – one minute it's a mirror, the next minute it's a window you see through. This is a very challenging place for a photographer because you have to deal with a lot of reflection and a lot of back lighting."

In contrast to the Las Vegas part of the project, where Natal has taken "what I call Hollywood portraits of wildlife indigenous to the area" and images where humans "totally demolish and then rebuild nature from the ground up," she described her images of the Biosphere 2 as portraits of a human-made structure originally built to support the exploration and colonization of space.

"This place is really interesting because it is the intersection between art and science. And that intersection goes all the way back to alchemy and magic. Later, art and science eventually split and became these very separate disciplines.

"But I think the Pierre (Meystre) has a very enlightened view of welcoming artists' interpretations and interaction, and I feel that kind of support from everyone from tour guides to the maintenance staffers, and some of them have been here a very long time."

Natal decided Iceland had to be a third part to Future Perfect when she spent June 2008 driving across that country's spectacular landscape, photographing geothermal features both manmade and natural.

"I feel that Iceland is a visual expression of the Earth. When you're there, you're standing on and looking at the contours of an environment that's new. It's like looking at Earth's skin. It's really intense. It got me to thinking about what comes after nature, what's post-nature."

She said of the Future Perfect project, "It's not so much that I want to go and document all these places, but that I use these places as a springboard to ask questions about what's going on in culture and how we design nature.

"And I'm optimistic in a weird way because I think we're moving from a sort of anthropocentric focus – which is putting us humans at the top and separate from nature, as controllers of nature – to a more ecocentric approach to nature, where we are starting to understand that we are a large part of these systems."