I am a visual artist and garden designer working with people, places, and ideas. Trained in landscape architecture, I use drawing, photography and writing as ways to engage sites and subjects. I look for projects that can be shaped in dialogue with clients and communities, developed through historical research, cross-disciplinary inquiry, and the unique conditions of the places they will inhabit. My focus is on large-scale processes like water systems and ecological change, and how critical but largely invisible processes can be meaningfully encountered. The graphic work through which I develop these projects become their own record of discovery, portable objects for intimate reflection. Together, site-work, and the graphics and objects that research produces, express the complementary relationships of private and public life.
In artwork, I look for something I haven’t yet seen, but once appearing, feels as familiar as if it had always existed. Materials and how they are worked express traditions and moods; images associate to other images; and boundaries can be converted to bridges. Whether a garden design, art installation or sketch, each part of experience reflects a whole, a whole that is everywhere, with an artwork temporarily at its center.
For a CV, click HERE.
To be added to my mailing list, discuss a commission, or inquire about purchasing artworks, please use the form HERE, or email me at:
todd(at)toddgilens.com
WRITING, BY AND ABOUT
Interview with GraphicsPro Magazine, on risk, innovation, technique and “the best part of working with graphic films”, posted 2/22
Harvard Magazine, September-October 2021, by Lydialyle Gibson, “Art in Science”
Tahoe Quarterly, Summer 2021, by David Bunker - “Exploring the Forest One Word at a Time”
Graphics-Pro Magazine, July 15th interview, “Visual Artist Tells Ecological Story Through Outdoor Graphics”
Confluence: Drawings and Photographs, by Kathleen Wong, University of California Natural Reserve System (website), February, 2020
Microtext 3, short form anthology, Medusa’s Laugh Press, 2017
Nature and Language,, Contemporary Poetry Series, poetry anthology, Corbel Stone Press 2017
Interview with Mary Burger, Articiple, March 16, 2017
Mitchell Schwarzer, “Animal Wrappers,” BOOM, A Journal of California, V2 No.3, 2012
“Generous Publicness,” Drift, a Magazine of West Coast Cultural Production, Issue 3, 2011
Interview, Rosy Chu’s ‘Bay Area People’, KTVU/KICU January 19th/20th, 2011
Alison Arieff, “In San Francisco, Endangered Species Roam the Streets”, GOOD, Transportation, February 9, 2011
Anne Senges, TerreEco, “De bus qui communient avec la nature”, February 25, 2011
Sustainable Practice in the Arts, “PROJECT: ENDANGERED SPECIES,” March 16, 2011
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, “In and Out of Place”, Issue 10, summer 2009
Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, review of Cooling Towers, by Bernd and Hilla Becher, MIT Press 2005
Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, review of America as Second Creation, by David Nye, MIT Press 2003
Landscape Journal, review of Ten Landscapes: Mario Schjetnan text by John Beardsley, Rockport Publishers 2002
Harvard Design Review, conference report, “100 years of Landscape Architecture at Harvard”, 2000
Prison Sentences: the Prison as Site, the Prison as Subject; exhibition catalogue, DAP and Eastern State Pennitentiary, 1995
NEWS, QUERIES, LINKS
National Public Radio’s “Science Friday” segment on my work with ecologists and the six-thousand word poem that resulted, first aired on April 26th, can be accessed at https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/mile-long-sidewalk-poem-reno-nevada/
Confluence: Stream Science, Handwriting, and Urban Curbs, a six-thousand foot-long poem about water and land, is now installed! An excerpt is download-able HERE, and a book proposal is in process. Please help support this temporary art project with a donation through the Truckee River Parks Foundation, HERE. For background, see Nevada Humanities blog post, or look for my blog at the tab above. For book pre-orders, send an email to todd (at) toddgilens.com with “Confluence Poem” in the subject line.
Exhibition at the Monterey Museum of Art, August 4 (reception) through October 1, 2023; an outdoor photography workshop, “The Wish to Photograph” will be offered through the Carmel Center for Photography on August 26th at Garland Ranch Regional Park.
A selection of the original drawings for “Reading Forest” are at the Truckee-Tahoe Airport Art Program, April 18 through July 17, 2023 (and the cafe is really good too!) I’ll talk about this work at the Nevada County Library in Truckee, 5:30-7pm on June 28th.
May 18 through November, 2021 - “Reading Forest” will be at the US Forest Service Taylor Creek Visitor Center, near South Lake Tahoe.
May 9, Why take pictures of landscapes and how does that express our relationship to place? I’m leading “The Wish to Photograph,” a six-hour workshop for the Point Reyes National Seashore Association.
April 7, the Bi-annual Bay-Delta Science Conference convenes a panel on art and science. Moderated by Hildie Spautz, CDFW, the panel includes myself, Ruth Askevold, SFEI, Rosemary Hartman, DWR, Obi Kaufman, author/artist, Rene Martin, University of Kansas, and Lisa Thompson, Regional San.
January 30, 2021, “The Poetry of Stream Ecosystems,” a workshop on writing as a path to stream observation, Point Reyes National Seashore Field Institute
October 29th, 5-6pm PST, I’m leading the Early Object Slow Looking Club meeting for the Minneapolis art space Pancake House. Join us HERE.
September 26th, a presentation at Typewknd, the international online conference for people who see, draw, make, study and sell type. Click HERE for “My Wish to Write in Someone Else’s Hand.”
Exhibitions opening Spring 2020 - at the MONTEREY MUSEUM OF ART in Monterey, California (update 3/17: postponed), and the TAYLOR CREEK VISITOR CENTER in South Lake Tahoe. See also this overview of why I like working with scientists on the University of California Natural Reserve System’s website.
September, 2019 - Temple Art Lofts, Vallejo. Exhibition of nine of the earth pigment drawings made for the National Forest Foundation’s Lake Tahoe West Restoration Partnership. Part of the US Forest Service and Vallejo Community Arts Foundation’s Vision of the Wild Film and Art Festival.
April, 2019 - Mesa Refuge - I will be in residence writing texts for an installation being developed for the sidewalks of Reno. See HERE for more or HERE for occasional newsletters about the project.
photo by McKenzie Long
July, 2018 - Postcards to the Future Forest, a collaboration with the National Forest Foundation' Lake Tahoe West project, is a two year commission to bring new concepts of forest management into piublic view through artworks. Phase one (and six free postcards) can be found at www.nationalforest.org/6postcards
March 2018 Watershed Prints, six limited editions issued
Three images in two color prints and silver leaf, 13 x 20" on Fabriano Rosaspina paper. Click HERE for images and pricing.
I will be presenting this work in a short talk on May 12th at the Berkeley Public Library, North Branch.
Saturday, May 13th, 2017 Photography workshop in Pt Reyes - I will lead a daylong class focused on how picture-taking connects us to landscapes through observation, storytelling and memory. It's called "The Wish to Photograph"
March-May 2017 Exhibition of Confluence project drawings at the Marin Headlands National Park Service Visitors' Center, through May 15th. -and see the ARTiciple Interview about the work here.
September, 2016 A twenty-three-foot sentence installed on the top of a curb in Reno NV as a materials test for the Confluence Projects. (Photo Konah Zebert)
August, 2016 Just published at The Gambler, a (partly) random literary and arts magazine.
April, 2016 Prints and postcards of the stream systems that supply Bay Area drinking water, extracted from the National Hydrologic Database - in a pop-up exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, April 16th all day till 8pm.
October, 2015 Monthly posts from "Confluence" project research are now available online HERE (you can also subscribe)
above: a diagram of the experimental stream channels at Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory, a UC ecological field station.
August, 2015 The "Confluence" projects are underway, thanks to the generosity of Hatchfund private donors and the Jiji Foundation. I am working with David Herbst's Lab and others, measuring streams and observing Sierra landscapes at the end of the summer after the driest winter on record.
July 23, 2015 Artist Talk at the Golden Thread Gallery, 84-94 Great Patric Street, Belfast, 1-2pm
above: digital cursive font I created from papers of W.R. Rodgers in the PRONI archives.
June - July 2015
I am in Belfast, Northern Ireland working at Digital Arts Studios as an artist in residence. A remarkable and complicated place, Belfast developed around a unique array of stream systems and topography. I'm looking into its history and trying out the process of making digital fonts from the handwriting of deceased Northern Irish authors.
May 15, 2015
My HATCHFUND campaign is live! Please help accomplish the research phase of my next project. A description and short video (by the fantastic IDEAS IN MOTION) are on the HATCHFUND website, donations are tax deductible...and there are prizes!
April 14, 2015 I go 'fishing' with FISHBIO, checking hatchery-raised salmonids before they are released and counting fish trapped on their way downriver
July 9, 2014 a FISHBIO feature on Overlook at Levy Art and Architecture
April - September 2014
Limited edition digital photographs of the Endangered Species project are at Levy Art and Architecture, 1286 Sanchez St in San Francisco through June 30th. M-F 9-5
Overlook, a project commissioned by LAA for their facade at 1286 Sanchez Street, will be in place through 2014.
Winter, 2014 Do sheep feel at home in their wool? Is it too extreme to think of them itching, or desperately hot, clutching for air, frantic for the shearer? Or what feeling they have for style, some sense of renewal in a new look, freshness of air against the skin?...(more)
A winter without rain - I'm feeling it for the fish! Fishbio, doing interesting work in California and SE Asia, has lent me an image for a new project: juvenile Sacramento suckers in a holding tank.
Fall, 2012 October 7th I'll be in conversation about "Shade" at the UC Berkeley Botranical Garden; 2:30-3:30, free with garden admission.
Summer, 2012 Just Opened at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden : Natural Discourse: Artists, Architects and Poets in the Garden. My project, "Shade" is a thousand-square foot photographic print of what a young plant might sense in the shade of an oak woodland. The exhibition runs through January, 2013
Fall, 2011 Photographs of the Endangerbuses may be seen in BLUR, at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, August 22nd through September 30th, 2011.
I spoke about endangered species advocacy at Counterpulse in San Francisco on September 14th, along with Brent Plater (Wild Equity Institute) and Jessie Raeder (Tuolumne River Trust).
Summer, 2011 By way of celebrating the Magna Carta coming to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, I led two L E T T E R F O R M workshops on June 5th . Contact me if you'd like a copy of the handout, which surveys developments in the history of letter-making.
One of my photographs of Endangered Species buses (but not the one above) was shown at the San Francisco Zen Center April 29 to May 29, part of an exhibition called "Sweetcake Enso." The exhibition is traveling to Zen practice centers around the country.
Endangered Species, my proposal for San Francisco public transit buses, is on the streets of San Francisco from mid-January on. Look for the project website or for endangerbus on Flickr and Twitter.
The proposal was also published in Bay Nature Magazine in their winter 2010 issue. For more on the project, download the ANTENNAE essay below.
ANTENNAE: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, published my essay "In and Out of Place" in their issue #10, Heat. The essay outlines the potential for public transit to connect animal and human communities, conservation land urban infrastructure. Download the article HERE.
TREASURE ISLAND BICYCLE RACK COMPETITION: My design is one of three finalists in a competition to create a signature bike rack design for Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. Two prototypes have been installed on 6th and Market Streets. See SF Bicycle Coalition Treasure Island page.
Thinking Through Nature: Philosophy for an Endangered World, University of Oregon 19-22 of June, 2008. Todd presented a paper titled Iconic Comensalism: Public Transit and Endangered Species. See www.uoregon.edu/~toadvine/TTN/
Resilience Art Exhibition, at Resilience 2008, an international Science Conference. See resilience2008.org/resilience/?page=php/art
