Artist statement
Ali Raizin was born in Chicago, but has lived in San Francisco for the past 12 years. She uses experiential sculpture, sound, and visual art to explore the relationship between people and the physical world—especially in the face of an uncertain future.
Her current practice exists as a response to the sinister, hovering shadow of climate change.
She asks: how can/must joy, connection, and play coexist with grief, anxiety, and despair. How can we be gentle with ourselves while confronting our most difficult emotions?
Can physical spaces and somatic experiences redefine our personal relationship to the planet and each other? How do we clear a path, within ourselves, for collective climate action?
70 years—
70 years—from denial to destruction is a visual hourglass tracking the time between 1959, when the oil industry first understood the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, and 2029, the deadline for our transition away from fossil fuels in time to limit global warming to 1.5ºC—and minimize the catastrophic impact to the planet.
A Path Forward
A Path Forward is an exploration of the relationship between joy, play, and day-to-day life alongside climate grief and anxiety. At human scale, the piece is a playful, spacious maze of aluminum tubes, ladders, nets, and shadows, its heavy message obscured. The message hovers nonetheless, most visible from above.