Zac Skinner Art

Like many, I fell in love with the sunsets fading behind the rolling mountains of the Hudson Valley: The seductive beauty of the land. While hiking, I often recall the works of Frederick Edwin Church or Thomas Cole, only to be confronted by discarded trash. That's a part of our Landscape too, one that's conspicuous. What about the invisible traces we leave in our landscape? A slow violence is descending upon us: heat rising.

An AI data center has been proposed in East Fishkill, our neighbors. As the world rushes toward massive AI infrastructure, we must acknowledge the cost: these facilities require immense (compounded) amounts of electricity, water, and refrigerant. While it is technological "progress," this buildout acts as a catalyst for global warming. In the last decade alone, I have witnessed the local consequences of a changing climate: summer droughts triggering forest fires in the Hudson Highlands, tornadoes tearing through our forests between Beacon and Wappingers, flash floods cutting through our yards, the Hudson River swelling to submerge streets and lowland parks, and scorching, silent heat waves that drive people and even the wildlife into hiding- dead silent heat.

My landscape paintings capture these symptoms of climate change—a future we are often selectively unconscious of: a landscape pushed past the tipping point. The air that gives us life is increasingly saturated with greenhouse gases; our storms are becoming more violent; and the land itself is suffering from desertification, where degraded soil leads to water scarcity, biodiversity collapse, and the desperation of climate-driven migration.

We are fortunate to live in a relatively forgiving region, but we are not immune. Desertification already threatens the American Southwest, South America, large swaths of Africa, the Mediterranean, and parts of Asia. Just as fluorinated gases eventually permeate the global atmosphere to become everyone's problem, we, too, must eventually reckon with the rising heat.

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Ann Street Gallery presents “Catching Fire: resilient alchemies in a burning world” #climatechanges #globalwarming #climateweek