My name is Jason Co and the title of my portfolio is “Immersive Marine Art,” which is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0. In this portfolio, I discuss the work of Mira Lehr, an environmental artist who has created marine art for more than forty years. Many of her works comprise of large, captivating pieces that encourage audiences to fully realize the importance and beauty of the ocean.
Lehr’s work centers around two themes: the diversity and overwhelming of marine life in the ocean. Many of her pieces are built on a large scale, capturing the beautiful messiness of aquatic life while also bringing attention to each individual part of the piece; Lehr invites people to walk around and immerse themselves in the simulated environment she created. By creating works that “grow” across the rooms of the exhibition, Lehr conveys the power of the marine environment to overtake wherever it goes in unpredictable patterns.
The three works I’ve chosen for my portfolio all resided inside Lehr’s “High Water Mark” exhibition at the Mennello Museum of American Art in Orlando, Florida. Instead of creating the works outside for anyone to view, Lehr creates her art inside to have more control over scale, from covering the walls to reaching the ceiling.
Much of Mira Lehr’s motivation to design these pieces of marine art can be traced from her participation in Buckminster Fuller’s World Game in 1969, which was a simulative “game” designed to gather people who would think up innovative solutions to Earth’s problems. Lehr wanted to help people the same way Fuller did by producing works that give a positive outlook on marine life and focus on capturing its beauty.
In an era where marine organisms are living in constant fear of extinction, and various ecosystems are on the brink of destruction due to pollution and climate change, Mira Lehr’s art recreates the ever-growing nature of the ocean and conveys the importance of understanding the fragility of these environments. Many people take the ocean for granted and do not realize how it consists of a massive world of different plants and animals living unique lives. Lehr’s ability to immerse us into her works of the marine environment allows us to visualize ourselves in these ecosystems and understand how valuable the ocean is.
