Are you ok? What are you doing to stay sane & ride out the quarantine?
Feeling anxious, like most people right now, but doing well. I'm kept super busy by this new routine, actually. I'm suddenly teaching photography and video online, which I've never done before, and homeschooling my kids at the same time. So far so good, though there's been many a screaming fight between the kids, and many a show watched.
My new favorite thing to do in homeschool is look at things under a microscope. I snatched a cast-off microscope from my college's surplus a few weeks ago, and the timing was great. I busted it out for the first day of homeschool, and it's endlessly fascinating.
What’s your favorite disaster movie?
Contagion! No, kidding, it's way too scary right now. Maybe "Twister"-- I haven't seen it since the '90s, but I'm fascinated by tornadoes, so I was very into it. Tornadoes make regular appearances in my nightmares.
Best art show you’ve seen this past decade and where?
"I Was Raised on the Internet" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago was a fantastic show I saw two years ago. It was weird, relatable, fascinating, upsetting, and beautiful all at once. My favorite piece was Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s Phantom, a black and white VR scan of a rainforest that you could wander through.
What are you working on right now? What’s coming up for you on the calendar for the future? Anything you want to plug?
I'm making 3D lenticular photographs, which is a new format for me. The images are about our relationship to nature, and in particular about trees I love. I've also been working on a project photographing ecologists in the field, which I hope to continue. I was planning to show the lenticular prints at a Rosalux show in April (in tandem with Melissa Borman's show), but, ya know-- pandemic.
What is your porn star name? (First pet, mothers maiden name)
Muffin Forest (First pet, and the street I grew up on, which works much better than my mother's maiden name.)
If you could pick a museum to break into and steal one painting, where and what?
I'd never do that! But I'd like to live with the "Unicorn in Captivity" tapestry at the Cloisters in New York for a while. It's stunning in real life in a way that can't be replicated on the screen or page, and since it's 500 years old, there's a weight of history as you take it in. I want to stare at the details for days.
Areca Roe is an artist based in Mankato and Minneapolis, working primarily with photography and video. A recurrent theme in her work is the interface between the natural and human domains. More recently her work explores how biomes are being affected by climate change, and how humans make our marks on the landscape with our activities
Areca teaches photography and video art at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She received her MFA in Studio Arts, from University of Minnesota in 2011. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has been a member of Rosalux since 2015. Roe has also received several grants and fellowships in support of her work, including the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and the Art(ists) on the Verge Fellowship. Her work has been featured on sites such as Colossal, Slate, Juxtapoz, WIRED, and Fast Company, and in Der Spiegel Wissen magazine.
Website: arecaroe.com