Ten faculty-led projects were selected as winners for the Chancellor’s Art Initiative grant — an award ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 in order to support art dedicated towards restoring environmental awareness, justice and identity. Among these winners is Rebeca Mendez, a member of the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge Faculty Advisory Cabinet and design media Arts professor.

Her video art installation “The Sea Around Us” portrays the ocean as a “fully animated body as well as a place of deep interconnectedness, multispecies kinship and fraternal coalescence”. The work is conceived as a spatial, immersive, cinematic experience with a focus on expressing the complex reality of life in the eastern Pacific Ocean, with a focus on bringing Indigenous voices to the forefront. The project contends with past environmental wrongdoing in the Southern California Bight, which stretches from Point Conception to Punta Colonet, and incorporates footage shot by robots sampling disintegrating DDT barrels on the ocean floor.

Read more about Mednez’s art installation at UCLA Newsroom.

Image Source: Pilar Diago