COLLEGE STATION, TX.- The Wright Gallery at the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University has announced its newest exhibition, “Notes from the Desert Aquarium” running January 21 through March 10. The exhibition features the work of two Texas artists, Carol Flueckiger and Robin Germany. Both teach in the Department of Art at Texas Tech University. Together, they make a powerful plea for awareness of climate change and a call for each individual to act accordingly. Flueckiger’s Solar Powered Paintings (cyanotypes) and Germany’s large format photographic prints of the Gulf of Mexico tells a story about light and shadow, seen and unseen, submerged and sunburned. The exhibition includes digital prints, cyanotype processes, mixed media, paintings and book arts - each method employing photography. The final outcome of these experimental explorations offer layered compositions at the intersection of the stark physical and cultural landscapes of Texas and the south plains. Thrift store culture and historic readings embellish the narrative with lost lessons on religion and science in a broad dialogue about beauty, loss, transformation and renewable energy.

In Germany’s photographs, the viewer is confronted with two disparate environments: underwater and barely above the waterline of the Gulf of Mexico, at the crux of two worlds. “In these photographs,” says Germany, “I am more interested in what escapes us, what is obscured, the gaps and blank parts of our understanding. I am seeking the stories in the water, unknowable stories of life and struggle, stories that are inextricably intertwined with ours and laden with implications for our future.”

Flueckiger’s work draws heavily on the absence of water in the desert environment of the plains in and around Lubbock. Implications of the destruction of the environment caused by fossil fuel based means of transportation are created through the use of the opposite; individual means of transportation. A bicycle, shoe skate or typewriter - each is combined with a windblown tumbleweed. Motion or potential motion in Flueckiger’s images is important, especially as it is connected to the power of an individual to transport herself independent of using destructive fossil fuels.