The scenes in these paintings present rituals humans pursue to assuage their guilt over the toll modern life takes on the environment. We change out our traditional bulbs for energy efficient fluorescent ones; we ride bikes as often as possible to reduce carbon emissions; we diligently turn down the faucet while brushing our teeth. The series plays on the anxieties of modernity, the paradox straddling our unwillingness to give up the luxuries of modern life and simultaneously doing nothing of grand consequence to fix the environmental problems it creates. These are small moments where our guilty conscience bleeds through into our lived experience.
This series were the first set of paintings Inga Bard created upon graduating from an Old Masters painting program in Florence, Italy.
