Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century

The core of Kline’s project Climate Change is Personal Responsibility (2023–), a sculptural installation set in the future, in the aftermath of climate disaster. Borrowing their forms from the temporary shelters used by refugees and migrants in the United States and around the world, the tent like structures here serve as both home and workplace for different types of “essential workers”—the people who will still have to physically go into work, often at great personal risk, when those in higher-paying jobs can work from home in comfort and safety. 

The installation also features two sets of related videos. One, Capture and Sequestration (2023), centers four iconic commodities made from materials that powered America’s rise as the world’s preeminent military, economic, and cultural power: sugar, tobacco, cotton, and oil. Through these materials, it is possible to trace the lineage of human-made global warming and climate change back through America’s global empire and the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the most painful parts of US history—the enslavement of Africans and the theft of Indigenous land. The other videos are fictional interviews with people who are living through catastrophic climate change in a future America. Although set decades from now, these videos are informed by extensive research into the experiences of survivors of climate-related disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey and the recent wildfires in California. In visualizing and making relatable the forecasts of climate scientists, Kline raises questions about whether the American people are willing and able to work together to prepare for, and possibly mitigate, what is to come.