UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Erin Mallea, assistant professor of art in the College of Arts and Architecture’s School of Visual Arts, has been selected for an Art/Sci Residency at PLAYA, a picturesque retreat in South Central Oregon that welcomes artists and scientists to participate in residencies and workshops that promote collaboration between the two disciplines.
During the residency in July, Mallea will focus on Issue 7 of “Tree News,” an experimental publication and programming platform focusing on tree and forest stories as segues into discussions of ecological orientations in art practice, cultural relationships to the natural world, environmental justice and climate change adaptation.
The forthcoming issue titled “Wild/Fire” is a collaboration with artists in Los Angeles and Oregon. The issue will consider the new reality of fire, fire management and parallels between the January 2025 Southern California Fires and contemporary political unrest.
“'Tree News' is a hybrid project,” Mallea explained. “It is simultaneously an artwork, an artist press, and a platform for creative research, experimentation and community building.”
Founded in 2021 by Mallea and artist Paper Buck, “Tree News” profiles trees, people, places and projects to serve as a platform to share resources, build relationships, highlight community projects and develop deeper understandings of the world around us. The publication, which is made possible in part by a Faculty Research Grant from the College of Arts and Architecture, features content submitted by artists, scholars, scientists, writers and land workers.
Mallea is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, photography, video and print publications. Her work scrutinizes constructions of culture, nature, land and time as entry points into contemporary social, political and environmental conditions.
She came to Penn State in 2023 from Carnegie Mellon University and centers much of her research and creative activity on placed-based research. For her work, Mallea immerses herself in the surrounding environment while contextualizing through art its history, culture and challenges, she said.
“I think of my work as a type of experimental documentary practice where I’m framing relationships or framing things that already exist in the world,” Mallea said. “The work often acts as microcosms of particular places showcasing the past, the present and the physical materiality of a site.”
As a visual artist, Mallea’s primary media are sculpture and photography. Her mixed media sculptures are visual representations of her place-based research and often focus on environmental anomalies both natural and man-made.
With “Permissible Dose” in 2023, Mallea investigated visual, auditory and olfactory experiences of living in proximity to industrial pollution. Referencing the common “rotten egg” smell of hydrogen sulfide emissions in Pittsburgh, the installation included a diffuser that misted a fragrance made from over-cooked hard-boiled eggs triggered by the real-time air-quality-index reading from a sensor near a steel mill.
“To me, working in different materials best represents the messiness of our relationships with the land and the environment and what those relationships reveal about cultural values, economic or political conditions,” Mallea said. “There are so many different layers to each story I try to tell with the hopes of better understanding not just the environmental history of a place, but also the contemporary issues around climate and environment.”
“Permissible Dose” and Mallea’s short film “Obscuring Power,” which follows citizens trained in the EPA’s Method 9 to visually monitor air pollution, will be featured in an article in a forthcoming edition of A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities.
Her work is currently on display in Carnegie Museum of Natural History Pittsburgh. In March, she will open a two-person show with artist Ally Messer at Grizzly Grizzly Gallery in Philadelphia.