Agnes Denes, Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan - With Statue of Liberty Across the Hudson, 1982/2023
Drawing on Agnes Denes’ philosophical concept of “echology” (echo + ecology), the MAK Center invites you to an evening of short artist talks and moderated conversation between three leading voices in the field of ecological art and activism.
Most recognized as an interlocutor between built environments and the natural world, Agnes Denes has a long history of expanding the field of eco-activism through poetic and philosophical interventions. Her most recognized artwork, Wheatfield—A Confrontation, which took the form of a “field of golden wheat” at the base of New York City’s financial district, epitomizes her working methodology. ECHOLOGY: PERSPECTIVES IN ECO-LOGIC honors Denes’s decades-long, multidisciplinary practice and highlights the lesser-known dimensions of her drawings and philosophical writing. Energized through dialogue with contemporary LA-based artists, the panel discussion champions Denes’ influence while testing her theories of eco-logic against emerging challenges for environmental consciousness.
Through short presentations and a moderated conversation, the panel explores the evolving relationships between humans, nature, technology, and infrastructure. Panelists Lauren Bon, Aroussiak Gabrielian, and Debra Scacco join moderator Jamison Edgar to discuss the branching lineages of eco-logic while placing their work in conversation with the ideas at the heart of Agnes Denes: The Future is Fragile.
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LAUREN BON
Lauren Bon is an American environmental artist and activist and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web.
Part of a global art cohort addressing our current environmental crisis, Bon uses living systems and infrastructure to create durational, large-scale, place-based projects, and performance, photography and sound to activate these works and engage her audiences. Through her multidisciplinary approach, Bon has carved out a space between land art, conceptual art, and transmission art. Her questioning of the status quo and persistent alteration of civic infrastructure demonstrate the power of artists to provoke change and shape opinion through soft diplomacy.
Bon’s work has been exhibited at Desert X, as part of the collateral events of the 59th edition of La Biennale di Venezia; at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The Hammer Museum at UCLA; The Exploratorium; DePaul Art Museum; The George Eastman Museum; The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA); The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MoCAD); Les Rencontres d'Arles, France, and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. She has also appeared on panels at Art Basel, UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, and World Expo 2025.
AROUSSIAK GABRIELIAN
Aroussiak Gabrielian, PH.D, FAAR, is a designer, scholar, media artist, and professional futurist whose work investigates the evolving relationships between the environment, technology, and culture. As Founding Design Principal and Futures Consultant at FOREGROUND DESIGN AGENCY, she leads transdisciplinary design-research and foresight initiatives that prototype regenerative modes of living and reimagine humanity’s entanglement with planetary systems.
Aroussiak is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California, where she teaches design across ecologic and biologic scales. She is an Affiliate Faculty of Media Arts Practice at the School of Cinematic Arts and Founding Director of the Landscape Futures Lab, which is focused on expanding the climate imaginary. Outside of academia, Aroussiak is a member of NEW INC, the arts and technology incubator of the New Museum in New York City, a trained futurist with the Association of Professional Futurists, and Founding Design Principal of foreground design agency, a critical design practice based in Los Angeles that aims to dismantle such structures of power and privilege that render specific humans, species, and matter silent.
DEBRA SCACCO
Through installations, sculptures, drawings, paintings and cultural happenings, research-based artist Debra Scacco studies the ecological and cultural impacts of human-induced change. By blending academic research with personal narratives, her work highlights histories of land and water and the beings most affected, creating pathways and platforms for public engagement and action. She is the inaugural artist-in-residence at the City of Santa Monica Public Works (2023–25) and the first artist-in-residence at the Ellis Island Museum (2012). Scacco co-founded the Getty PST ART Climate Impact Program (2022–25) and climate-focused creative residency Air Projects (2016–20). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the City of Los Angeles, and the Durfee Foundation, featured in Art in America and the Los Angeles Times, and exhibited and collected internationally.
JAMISON EDGAR
Jamison Edgar facilitates exhibitions and the international residency program at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. Their writing and curatorial practice champions the indispensable role queer, trans, Black, and Brown artists play in shaping revolutionary spirit, with an eye toward the entanglement of art, science, and technology. Edgar studied queer history and archival practices at Carnegie Mellon University (MFA) and fine art at the University of Georgia (BFA). Their writing has appeared in publications by the Institute for Contemporary Art Pittsburgh, Contemporary Performance, and the Estonian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. They are a 2023–2024 SUPERCOLLIDER Art+Sci Ambassador and serve on the executive board of the New Media Caucus. Edgar’s exhibitions and public programs have been featured in Artforum, Frieze, Forbes, Hyperallergic, Art Papers, the Los Angeles Times, CARLA, and NPR.