In Mark Baugh-Sasaki’s solo exhibition, entitled Transect, the artist investigates the latticed influences of geology, photography, and the landscape on his own perceptions of place. Returning to and documenting the same geographic locations over multiple years, his work bears witness to the effects wrought by nature and, increasingly, by human-centered climate change. Over the past year, Mark Baugh-Sasaki and Mehr Kumar, a researcher in the Oceans Department at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability, have been collaborating on a project related to the endangered whale population of the Southern Ocean (formerly known as the Antarctic Ocean). By investigating the sediment layers of a mud core collected from this region, their research seeks to understand the devastating effects of 20th-century whaling practices on the Southern Ocean’s ecosystem. This collaboration has also raised larger, more philosophical questions: in a world already so dramatically reshaped by humans, what does it mean to restore an ecosystem, how, and to what end?

re.riddle