Work by Matéa LeBeau

My Climate Change Anxiety (2019)

For my self-directed digital media project, I wanted to depict the ways in which my daily rituals or habits end up contributing to the seemingly inescapable problem that is climate change. Climate change gives me extreme amounts of anxiety, so my goal for this video was to describe how this issue makes me feel while attempting to make my audience share these anxieties. Through hand-drawn animated segments, I address guilt associated with using dairy or meat products, coffee, single-use cups and plastics, soy, purchasing from fast fashion industries, and unnecessary carbon emissions while explaining how much of an environmental impact these simple decisions can make.

I'm very interested in how art and climate change can work together to create engaging visual content, and I'm eager to continue to find ways in which art can inform my audience about environmentalism and sustainable practices.

Produced for ART 2701 Introduction to Digital Media, taught by Assistant Professor of the Practice in New Media Jaret Vadera. 

What Remains (2021)

What Remains is a personal exploration of extinction in the context of climate change. Through the use and depiction of archaic technologies, petroleum-based materials, photography, and printmaking, the works in this show highlight the nature of extinction as a current contemplation. As nature coexists with abandoned oil infrastructure and integrates its iron remains into the landscape, one can't help but be reminded that the earth will carry on, with or without us. Reckoning with the long-term, concealed, and deeply integrated influence of the oil industry, What Remains invites you to imagine a world post fossil fuels.

What Remains was displayed in the Experimental Gallery in Olive Tjaden Hall, September 20–24, 2021, and was partially funded by the Gibian-Rosewater Traveling Research Award.