A writer and a filmmaker, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is an eco-feminist;  she asks the viewer to contemplate the apocalyptic horror of worldwide environmental destruction.

Environmental destruction is not visually exciting spectacle to be consumed.  Aside from the visuals of icebergs melting into the sea – it is as dull and monotonous as the industrial machines shown here.  By compressing time, and borrowing tropes from horror, the images and sounds of eco-destruction are rendered here as relentless and hypnotic, mesmerizing and disturbing; thus the series disrupts the passive consumption of earth and Nature as an idyllic object.  Nature, however, is neither “pretty” nor an object to be easily consumed.

Intended as an altar-like triptych installation, ‘Gaia Triptych’ (2016) includes a trilogy of films: “Waste,” “Not,” and “Want Not.”

Not (2016)

An eco-horror about human beings – a brief-lived, relentlessly destructive invasive species who once roamed the earth.

     

 

Waste (2016)

“Waste” is a poetic meditation on the relatively brief amount of time that human beings lived on the earth with many billions of years compressed into five minutes.

 

Want Not (2016)

“Want Not” is an abstract feminist eco-horror film about hyper-consumption: the violent brutal struggle between Earth and late stage capitalism.

 

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Willa Cather Professor of English and Film at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She is author of many volumes including, most recently; “Disruptive Feminisms: Raced, Gendered, and Classed Bodies in Film” (which includes a section on women and ageism) and

“Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse” (which directly relates to the Gaia Triptych.) Her films include “The Women Who Made the Movies”  (1992, distributed by Women Make Movies).

http://www.gwendolynaudreyfoster.com