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Cara Levine

Without End

In the Evening

By Else Lasker-Schüler, translated by Eavan Boland.

***

It was pure coincidence that I visited Cara Levine‘s exhibition Without End at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Holocaust Education Center during the same week that my kids arrived in town. They are permanently relocating as survivors of the Altadena /Eaton Fire that destroyed their house, their neighborhood, their newly planted gardens and every memento they owned from more than three generations. Not a coincidence, then, that Levine’s current work, concerned with grief elicited by climate-related natural disasters and originating in exactly those same (Palisade) fire-induced losses, intensely resonated on a personal level.

Levine’s work has focused on loss, grief and pain of all kinds across the years of her practice since she earned a BFA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI (2007) and an MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA (2012). More importantly, though, it has offered perspectives on both, the causes of losses and communal ways in which healing can be implemented. Put differently, the work is not exclusively focused on individual experience, but on unveiling the collective circumstances that are producing loss, as well as offering tools to overcome trauma.

Before I get into the specifics, let me emphasize what I consider the strongest aspect of her work before us.

Real grief strikes down to the bone. There are no layers, no occlusions, no obscurations that it does not penetrate – they all become irrelevant. Levine’s sculptures and installations have that same directness: what you see is what you get. In our world where art often takes pride in obscurity, the need for deciphering, the veiled references, the analyses left to those in the know, her work will have none of that. Language is explicit, forms are defined, function leaves no room for interpretation. The art directly communicates shared human experience, and the artist is on an equal level with the viewer, no hierarchical distancing allowed. This, of course, is the basic element of communal experience, a focus of Levine’s makings, just as much as the individual’s grief.

***

I first came across Levine’s projects in 2022, when I was writing about the waves of eco-anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder of climate catastrophe survivors seen by clinical psychologists. Therapists face both increasing number and intensifying depth of anxiety disorders related to climate change. Data from the general population confirmed the trend. “A 2020 poll by the American Psychiatric Association showed that “more than two-thirds of Americans (67%) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on the planet, and more than half (55%*) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on their own mental health.” 

What could be done before you need to find a therapist? Some political moves might help activists. Science is contributing tools to fight collective helplessness. And then there is art: Levine and other contributing artists invited people to participate in physically digging a hole to throw in their grief. For seven days, echoing our Jewish custom of sitting Shiva after a death – a time when community meets and supports the mourner – a large hole was dug in Malibu. The project happened on the grounds of the Shalom Institute campus which was devastated by the Woolsey Fire of 2018, an early taste of the fiery destruction to come. It struck me at the time that digging that hole might be one of the ways in which we could dig ourselves out of one: forming alliances (the contributors ranges from Chumash tribal leaders to cantors from local Synagogues) would provide an exit to suffering grief in isolation. Alerting community to the causes of wild fires might also lead to collective action to tackle climate change denials.

A video of the project can be watched at the current exhibition. So can a subset of exhibits from Levine’s project alerting us to the number and types of deadly shooting of unarmed civilians.

***

This is not a Gun (TINAG) was triggered by an article in 2016 Harper’s Magazine that depicted objects held by unarmed victim of police shootings. The artist carved replicas of these innocuous objects, and workshop participants created ceramic models while discussing topics of racism and police brutality often associated with these kinds of shootings.

One of the most famous of these cases happened in New York City in 1999, when unarmed 23-year-old Guinean student named Amadou Diallo was struck with 19 of 41 rounds fired by four New York City Police Department plainclothes officers. They were charged with second-degree murder and subsequently acquitted at trial in Albany, New York on the grounds that they had a reasonable expectation to be endangered and drew a gun first in self defense.

Since then, long-term data collection revealed the fact that these shootings disproportionally victimize Blacks and other people of color. But there is also research evidence that Blacks and Whites both misperceive something innocent to be a weapon more often, if the object is held by a Black rather than a White person. In other words, all of us are likely to exhibit modern racism or implicit racism – automatic, unconscious, unintentional – still being tied to a culture that routinely links the idea of Blacks with the idea of deviant behavior, or a set of ideas, mostly bad, that concern violent crime, poverty, hyper sexuality or moral corruptness.

You might not act on those beliefs, you might deny them, but the associations are carried by most of us through permanent exposure to the linkage of Black to negative or threatening concepts, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we have the best of intentions and the most egalitarian politics. (For a more detailed discussion see my review here.) Projects like Levine’s draw attention to the stereotypes (and for that matter the historical burden of racism) with the hope of motivating people to intercept their own mental associations.

Acknowledging the existence of racism, explicitly or implicitly expressed, and the hold it has on our society is the necessary antecedent to fight it. I can scarcely imagine a more timely reminder given what is unfolding in our communities at this very point in time, regardless of the color of unarmed victims of state violence.

***

The new work in this exhibition centers around containers of sand, intended to be deposits of what we release into them – drawing our sorrows, by hand or dowel. For those dealing with climate-related losses a lasting memento is offered – “silver linings” made of pewter filling in the contours of a sand drawing (by appointment, see the OJMCHE website)

They will be given to the participants and a replica stored in the artist’s collection. Examples from prior studio work are on display.

Sands shift, patterns will disappear, but the act of thinking what to depict and the physical act of drawing might very well form a containment that holds the grief momentarily outside of ourselves. Only to return.

Without end. As the aptly chosen exhibition title suggests.

Maybe the healing comes not from the unrealistic termination of the pain, but the insight that we walk on shared ground, sand before us containing multitudes, a communal experience. Certainly in the case of our own family’s post-fire trajectory, community sustenance made all the difference. The help – emotional, physical, financial, spiritual – being extended from the farthest corners was medicine. Solidarity as a first hand experience.

But maybe it is also a time to put the aspect of healing on a slow burner, and instead increase the heat of resistance against forces that create avoidable losses in the first place. Climate change denial is just one of the aspects of hostility towards science that we are currently experiencing, but one that has huge implications for the planet at large. Our time is running out to implement the necessary changes that can prevent the worst suffering for millions of people killed or ravaged by loss through climate catastrophes.

An installation of imprinted birchwood panels on some sort of infinity loop names types of loss, predominantly private causes, but also some of the general political challenges we face, from the legality of immigrants, the divisiveness in our society, to the lack of protecting our earth. I found myself longing for stronger words, in visually more prominent positions. The TINAG project was so courageous and openly political. Why not here? We live in an age of multiple mass extinctions around the world, at a time when authoritarian or even fascist history repeats itself in a variety of disguises across nations. This is a time of pandemics, starvation and withholding of medical or economic aid that dooms hundreds of thousands of people. Horror without end.

How do you draw a representation of genocide in a sand installation? The birchwood would have held the word.

***

What held grief was a dream catcher high up, pretty easy to miss, commemorating the untimely death of artist Peter Simensky, chair of the Graduate Fine Arts MFA program at California College of the Arts, Levine’s friend and mentor, to whom this exhibition was dedicated. For those unfamiliar with this unusually creative, political and perceptive artist, here is a link to an exhibition booklet from a previous memorial exhibition at Reed College’s Cooley Gallery and here is a link to his website.

I could not discern if one element of the dream catcher was indeed made out of pyrite, a kind of rock central to Simensky’s last artistic endeavors, Pyrite Radio works. Doesn’t matter. Whatever form his signal takes, I believe it will contain pride and joy at what is on display in the gallery below, the courage not to walk away from grief included.

Without End – Recent work on Grief by Cara Levine

Until May 31, 2026

OJMCHE

724 NW Davis Street
Portland, OR 97209

Wednesday – Sunday: 11 – 4

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Holes Being Dug

Almost out of the door, I grabbed the small point&shoot camera despite knowing better. It had been a bad week of painful lymphedema in chest and arm around the incisions, and I really should not lift my arm too much. Oh well. Was I ever glad I had at least this camera with me when doing the familiar round at Oaks Bottom. Come join me!

They were out, my cherished crows, in masses, hanging in the trees squawking, strutting through the meadow. Which should be much less straw colored in February, reminding me that we’ve now had four years in a row where rainfall was way below average.

Entering the wooded path, the beauty – Japanese print-like – of the duckweed on reflecting water was inspiring, even with the knowledge that it is found growing in water associated with cropping and fertilizer washout, or down stream from human activities, particularly from sewage works, housed animal production systems and to some extent industrial plants.

Given the color, I was not sure if it was common duckweed or more likely azolla, red water fern. The ducks didn’t care, and neither should we. Both are fascinating plants, providing nutrients and helping ecosystems.

Gadwalls, I learn. They live in the Great Plains but migrate through here.

The herons were unperturbed, out for lunch, ignoring me walking but a few meters away from them. I guess the loudly singing tree frogs at the pond’s rim were on the menu.

Beaver activity was visible everywhere,

but I think this fellow was a muskrat.

I can never tell. A kilometer further down I spotted this guy, and given his lunch, a fish, the likelihood was otter. As I said, cheap camera, not the resolution one would have wished for with this sight. I mean how often do you see an otter eating fish 15 minutes downtown from city center?

When I got to the viewpoint, the extent of the drought became more visible. This should be a lake, folks, not a dry hole in the ground.

If you are like me, it gives you the creeps. If you are like many of our compatriots, it instills fear, sometimes to the point of a condition that the the American Psychological Association (APA) defined as eco-anxiety, ”a chronic fear of environmental doom.” It is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5,) but clinicians all over report attempts to treat it.

Not sure if this was the doe or one of her fawns that I regularly saw last summer

Last April, an article in the Scientific American described in depth what therapists are facing and how they have to make decisions about how to treat the massively increased numbers of patients who present fear if not panic in the face of climate catastrophe. A 2020 poll by the American Psychiatric Association showed that “more than two-thirds of Americans (67%) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on the planet, and more than half (55%*) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on their own mental health.” 

Red-tailed hawk

The NYT joined the topic with an article last week, describing the treatment approach by one of the earliest proponents of a necessary treatment approach to eco-anxiety.

Here is the dilemma: there is a tension between eco-anxiety’s role as a rational response to an existing threat, on the one hand, but also a potentially debilitating response, on the other hand.

There’s no clear, standard definition as to when eco-anxiety is unhealthy. It is rational to be fearful in view of a threat, and the threat is real. It is, however, unhealthy if it paralyzes your daily function, as it now does for scores of people. There is also the question of therapists’ own (political) beliefs. If they think your analysis of the threat is exaggerated or delusional (they don’t believe in climate change or its imminence) they will pathologize your response, which will have an impact on your therapeutic relationship.

Scrub Jay

Therapists themselves also feel unable to cope with their own feelings about environmental destruction. “When a therapist hasn’t begun to come to terms with their own emotions around climate change, it can add to the emotional turmoil of clients coping with overwhelming grief and anxiety, said Tree Staunton, a climate psychotherapist in Bath, England. For example, a therapist’s own grief, anxiety or guilt might come off as defensiveness or withdrawal.“ (Ref.)

Then there are the cases of people, in particular children, who have been personally impacted by traumatic events like fires, flood and tornados or hurricanes caused or aggravated by climate change, who are living with actual PTSD that needs to be treated while the threat of these events is ongoing.

Willamette River bank bordering Oaks Bottom on the Westside

The trolls were out, en masse, in the comment section for the NYT article. But so were thoughtful letters to the editor (2 examples below,) that highlighted important facts found both in and beyond the article.

“… the corporate construct that cleverly shifts the responsibility of a carbon footprint onto each individual. This is similar to the way the petrochemical and plastics industries have shifted all responsibility for recycling, particularly of the packaging they create, onto the individual, although the responsibility for recycling plastics should lie with the manufacturers.” (Mary Englert,
Portland, Ore. The writer is a retired licensed professional counselor.)

“youth distress is directly related to the experience of governmental dismissal of and inaction on climate change. Young people are essentially reporting that their governments are gaslighting them by dismissing and devaluing their concerns, and by falsely stating that they are taking necessary action. This has significant political implications. Multiple reviews of the mental health effects of climate change (this is not a new topic in academia) all predict civil unrest and conflict as the long-term outcome. Politicians have a chance to correct course, honor their young constituents’ fears and act decisively. While therapy matters, preventing climate catastrophe matters more.” Mary G. Burke,
San Francisco. The writer is a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco and a member of the university’s Climate Change and Mental Health Task Force.

Baldies

It is easy to feel helpless and anxious when thinking what we can do about the destruction of our world, when really a few large corporations—and complicit politicians—call the shots. But there ARE things one can do, and in the doing alleviate some of the anxiety.

There are some political moves that can help activists. Science is contributing tools to fight collective helplessness.

There is important information that you can read, outlining possible next steps. Earthtrack, for example, offers tons of information about governmental subsidies that harm the environment. Environmentally harmful subsidies (EHS) are government actions that by design or effect accelerate the production or consumption of natural resources or undermine broader ecosystems supporting planetary health. The data show at least $1.9 Trillion a year (2% of global GDP) being dished out to Energy, Mining(non-energy), Fisheries, Forestry, Water, Construction, and Transportation industries. The organization informs about both the beneficiaries of such subsidies, worldwide, and reports on possible actions against them.

Anna’s Hummingbird

And then there is art. The hole in the ground where the Oaks Bottom Lake should be reminded me of this project from L.A. last year.

In Malibu, a Large Hole Is Being Dug to Contain Your Grief

Cara Levine and associated artists provided their week-long participatory event as a communal reaction to and lifting of grief over the losses incurred during the pandemic – including the land, where the dig took place, of The Shalom Institute campus – which was devastated by the Woolsey Fire of 2018. Might as well throw our eco – fear into the mix, or the hole as the case may be, being strengthened by knowing we are not alone.

Or we could be digging ourselves OUT of a hole by collective action. You know where you find me doing just that.

Scrub Jay

Music today is one of my picks when I try to deal with surges of anxiety.

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