The Tumbleweed, For Example (Photos + Documents) — Visual Artist + Educator: Beth Johnston

The Tumbleweed, For Example, Installation view,
Microscope Gallery, New York, NY, 10’ x 22”

There are many ways to talk about climate change.
The Tumbleweed, is one example.

Images + Documents:

Typed Original Text, 8.5”x11”, 2022

Entangled, printed as distributed triptych, 20” x 30”

Black and white medium format film processed with plant-based film developer made with locally collected sagebrush and tumbleweeds.

The Tumbleweed, Scanned 4x5 color film, 8” x 10”

Temporal Chasms (diptych of triptychs), film stills from The Great Delusion video essay, 8” x 30” (each), 2022

Some rough thoughts on the tumbleweed:

In January of 2020, a strange phenomenon occurred in Washington State: waves of tumbleweeds overtook driving cars, consuming the vehicles and the disoriented drivers and passengers within them. Scenes of the event appeared on local news channels under the name Tumblegeddon. Rescue efforts took hours to dig the cars out of the 30-foot-high mound of tumbleweeds. A rescued woman explained, “normally, you can drive right through them.”
The tumbleweed has become synonymous with the American West. Hollywood depictions of the western “frontier” often start with scenes of this dry, prickly, circular weed bouncing across the desert. However common this weed has become, the species was originally invasive to the region. The parent plant to tumbleweeds, Russian Thistle, was accidentally introduced to the United States by Ukrainian immigrants in 1873 in contaminated bags of flax seeds. Russian thistle is a beautiful, robust, emerald green color. In the arid west, it is often the only green in sight, a mirage of sorts. When the parent plant dies and dries, the tumbleweed is born; carried by the wind it can spread up to 250,000 seeds per plant. The more disturbed the land, the better for seed germination. The land of the “wild west” offered this disturbance as land grabs, mining, and various other forms of terraforming took place. Tumbleweeds have now taken over the landscape, suffocating other vegetation and radically altering ecosystems.

I grew up on a farm in southern Idaho, pulling these weeds from the fields by hand. We tried to stop their spread and contamination of my family’s alfalfa seed harvest. The stems of the plant are stiff and would often cut through my skin. Sometimes, the roots of the weed were so strong that it took falling over backwards to yank them from their place.

Original polaroid, 2.5”x3”, 2021

The tumbleweed symbolizes the frontier myth. This myth, which romanticizes the European colonization of the United States from the 17th through 20th centuries, depends on the displacement, erasure, and continued genocide of Indigenous peoples and their cultures across North America. The false imagination of the Western US being a vast, uninhabited landscape helped support ideas such as manifest destiny where white settlers “had the divine right” to take and settle land throughout the United States. The erasing of Indigenous people and their cultures is central to the power structures of the frontier myth. I’m interested here in how the belief in the frontier myth, created very real forms of destruction and ongoing harm. While myth’s are defined as “false ideas” or belief in something that is not true. Belief systems have physical outcomes and thus create realities. We are now living in the creation of this myth in various forms.

The frontier myth remains influential not only within the Western US region but in American identity, values, and ideals more broadly, including in ideas of rugged individualism and the false guise of American “freedom” for a select few. The tumbleweed has taken root in the American Imagination.

As the United States continues to be both a key emitter and obstruction in work to mitigate climate change, the concepts tied to ideas of the frontier myth have global impacts.

The tumbleweed, then, becomes an example for some of the entanglements of US culture with the climate crisis. The conditions that allow for weather phenomena such as tumblegeddon, are climate conditions. Rising desertification and drought in the Western US, has allowed Russian Thistle to propagate exponentially, causing waves of tumbleweeds to overtake cars. While we often think of climate disasters as being linked to hurricanes and rising sea levels, the wave of tumbleweeds is also a sign of a changing climate and the inherited legacies of settler-colonial terraforming.

As desertification and land disturbance increases across the United States from anthropogenic climate change, tumbleweeds (as they are now formed from a myriad of invasive plants, not just Russian Thistle) are expected to expand their territory to inhabit most of the country.

Installation:
Paired with The Great Delusion

Intallation view, The Great Delusion, custom steel stand and steel tumbleweeds
Microscope Gallery, New York, NY 2022

The Tumbleweed, For Example, Installation view,
Microscope Gallery, New York, NY, 10’ x 22”

The Tumbleweed, For Example is paired here with The Great Delusion video essay.

Entanglement:
The photos and documents of The Tumbleweed, For Example apprear in the film and vice versa.

The black and white film photograph above was processed with plant based film developer made of locally collected sagebrush and tumbleweeds. It was printed as a distrubed triptych to point to its pervasiveness and distribution.

Tumbleweeds (physically, metaphorically, and symbolically) are found in every form of this work.

I’m interested in their representation of the american imagination, how they propogate in both domestic and wild spaces, their resemblence to neurons and mapped pathways, and their physical transformation of the land (among other things).

Further...
Tumbleweeds are often the first plants to take root in a disturbed landscape and can stabalize soil for other plants to then flourish. So... I’m also interested in what we might learn from these weeds- their adaptability and flourishing in the face of disturbance.

The Tumbleweed, For Example
(Photography + Documents)

2022-Ongoing

Photography +
Original Typed Text

Black and white film processed with plant based developer made of weeds including a tumbleweed.

Paired with:
The Great Delusion Video The Tumbleweed, For Example (installation)

[the three projects together constellate a conversation across mediums with several entry points and ways of thinking through related problems]

Exhibitions:

RISD Graduate Thesis Exhibition
Providence, RI
May- June 2022

Microscope Gallery
All Texts About Love
New York, NY
July - August 2022

Strata Gallery Fragments
Sante Fe, NM
January 2023

beth johnston...

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