Erin Charpentier and Travis Neel work at the unruly edges of art and urban ecology to explore the possibility of collaborative survival within the weedy entanglements of human-disturbed landscapes.
Past projects have centered on the weediness of the mesquite tree, the thorny megaflora of the Llano Estacado in West Texas, where we lived for a number of years. This line of research manifested in the Mesquite Mile—an ecosocial artwork situated in the city of Lubbock, TX. This multi-year project relocated mesquite trees and other drought-tolerant plants from rural and ruderal sites (where they are considered weeds) into the urban core of Lubbock, where they contribute to solar cooling, stormwater runoff mitigation, and increased biodiversity. The project reframed the mesquite tree, a victim of ecological forgetting, as a cultural asset and transformed over an acre of urban streetscape into green infrastructure-based short-grass prairie habitat.
Their collaborative work has been supported and recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mid-America Arts Alliance’s Interchange Artists Fellowship program, Headlands Center for the Arts, Southwest Contemporary, the British Cultural Council, Stoveworks Artist Residency, the Tallgrass Artist Residency, the Brooklyn Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Temple Contemporary, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the RedLine Contemporary Art Center, and numerous DIY art spaces across the United States and Canada.
Website: workabout.space