This painting of the Sleeping Bear Dunes was made over the course of 8 hours on a corrugated plastic yard sign that reads “Open House”, which is then staked into an astroturf and fabric block made to resemble a swath of sod. “Open house” is a real estate term indicating that a property is available for tour by interested buyers, and the astroturf sod is a reference to land, development, and the flattening of ecosystems. The intention of this painting is to comment on the unprecedented seizure and sale of public lands by the current administration, who are attempting to force the Bureau of Land Management and National Forrest Service to sell off 3 million acres of public land for private timber, oil and land development over the course of the next 5 years through a provision that was snuck into this year’s spending bill. While the current spending bill has not yet passed, and the proposed sale does not yet extend to national parks, I want the audience from Traverse City to recognize that they have a real stake in this fight and that each sequential loss of environmental regulation makes all our lands and our future as a species less secure. The natural beauty and rare ecosystems protected by the BLM and NFS are no less precious or beautiful than the Sleeping Bear Dunes, and every deregulation and precedent enacted to steal land out west is a step toward the forfeiture of our own environment and natural treasures here in Michigan. The only way to preserve our future is to act as one people, in common struggle against the capitalists who intend to exhaust every natural resource on Earth until all that is left of our world is ash and smoke.
