Hi, my name is Mindy Bray. My piece “Structure #2” is part of a body of work that explores architectural imagery taken from photographs of the Biosphere 2 facility in Southern Arizona. Constructed between 1987 and 1991, the Biosphere 2 was a research experiment meant to demonstrate the viability of living in a closed ecosystem in outer space. The building itself is reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, and its mission was to replicate the 7 biomes of earth’s ecosystems within a single sealed environment, in preparation for a possible future in outer space due to climate disaster on earth. As a kid, growing up in Arizona, I took a school field trip to visit the Biosphere and saw the scientists who were inside, participating in the experiment, closed within the facility for two years. This was my first experience with climate anxiety. The experiment, famously, failed, and revealed the complexity and interconnectedness that makes ecosystems on earth function. It also revealed our fragility, our interdependence, and our human-driven desire to understand and control the world around us.
As an adult, I returned and photographed the Biosphere 2, which is now a climate research facility operated by the University of Arizona. I used these photographs, isolating the geometric structure of the building, to create a series of drawings and paintings. These pieces use negative shapes to point to the spaces between the architecture, so that the building hovers like a mirage, a place that holds our collective hope and anxiety surrounding climate change.