I have a confession to make: Nature-themed art usually doesn’t really do it for me. Look, I eat a plant-based diet and like to hike and roll around in the grass. I love the natural world and find it endlessly fascinating and moving. And climate change is undeniably a problem, which leaves me feeling all the more like an emotionless sociopath when artwork that references it shows up. But it wasn’t until I saw nature-themed art that really worked in the form of Sarah Moore’s video project Greenway at Unsmoke Systems that I could articulate why I have such a hard time feeling moved by most figurative depictions of nature. Greenway was immersive, a series of tunnel-like screens with flashes of film footage Moore took on the Churchill Greenway in Penn Hills.
The immersiveness of Greenway highlighted the fact that we are a part of the natural world and the natural world is a part of us. Where “nature” is often framed as some abstract, amorphous thing, Greenway distilled it down to a granular experience that’s in everything, including the human body and the human mind. The installation felt both small and big—small in that it made me feel like the Greenway’s stems and flowers overwhelmed me, and big in the sense that it filled the entire space of Unsmoke Systems. Unsmoke is a warehouse space, so large that the owner closes it in the winter because it gets too cold, but Moore managed to make it feel like a secret garden.
When I met Moore, it was one of those moments where I knew I had to talk to an artist further. Her work was not traditional, and I didn’t want to do a traditional interview, sitting down in the gallery. So, instead, I opted to take a walk with her on the Churchill Greenway, where she filmed the videos within Unsmoke. The Greenway is a sprawling series of pathways off of Beulah Road in the borough of Churchill, and, like many things in Pittsburgh, one of the most significant things about it is what it used to be. At one point, it was a golf course owned by the Westmoreland family. When the golf course fell into disrepair, there was an effort to build condos over the unused land, but the landscape would have sunk them into the ground. Allegheny Land Trust then took it over for preservation.
Part of what drew Moore to film there was the “rewilding” of a former golf course, a rare success story in an often doom and gloom narrative of pollution and urban decay. Moore is from South Dakota, so she has a familiarity with the sublimity of the natural world and human fascination with it. When she moved to Penn Hills, she discovered it near her and her husband’s home by chance and started filming there just out of simple interest in the place. She had had the show at Unsmoke on the books for several years, but filming during different seasons on the Churchill Avenue Greenway ended up being the iteration for her show that she went with. She collaborated with her husband, musician Ian Cartwright, to create the soundscape of Greenway. (If you missed the show, you can still listen on Bandcamp).
There’s a curious mixture of manmade and natural forces at work within the greenway itself. Moore pointed me to the fact that the stream has an eerie, iridescent glow due to aluminum pollution. There are small flashes of graffiti on the concrete stairways. Art is manmade, and though many artists have romanticized the solitary lifestyle in the forest, creative centers are often where there’s the most manmade crap around. Moore is wary about how nature can be commodified and urged people to interact with the natural spaces around them, like the greenway. Her installation felt like a small-scale “rewilding” of Unsmoke itself, making viewers imagine that they were as small as a blade of grass.
I was curious about Moore’s work in some part because there’s a real lack of large-scale video installation in Pittsburgh. It’s also an entirely different art form from painting or photography in that it isn’t commercial. There isn’t a “market” for film clips the way there is for fine arts. You don’t sell them to collectors or view them stagnantly. One of the things about video installation, too, is its dynamism. It moves and breathes in a way that paintings only do after you take some LSD.
When I interviewed Moore, I made the choice not to take notes on my phone as I usually do when working on a show review or an artist profile, but rather to take video as I spoke and then remember key details. To be honest, this made writing hard. But I wanted to take in the landscape as I walked with her and feel a little of what she felt in the greenway when she filmed. To push myself not just to be writing from a place of summary, but from my own reflection. Viewing art like Moore’s is less analytical than viewing hanging wall artwork. It shut my mind off and made me want to just sit with it for a long while. It immersed me, which is what video art is often meant to do. Though installations get a bit of a bad rep at times, painters and sculptors might have something to learn from it—that art should pull you in and immerse you in its world, no matter what medium.
Sarah Moore recently received a grant from the University of Pittsburgh to continue working on Greenway.
PETRICHOR 
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