Donna Bassin Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW highlighting at the same time the uniqueness of the viewers' response to the work of art. When walking our readers through the genesis ofEnvironmental Melancholia, would you tell us something about your usual setup and process? Donna Bassin: Environmental Melancholia's origins began during the pandemic's early phases after I closed my studio, interrupting a portrait project, My Own Witness, which started after the 2016 presidential election. I had initiated portrait collaborations with individuals who felt silenced, invisible, and un- entitled to their place in this disordered American. I had just begun to find that sweet spot of creative flow with this project, and I was despondent and artistically lost having to end this project prematurely. Being of a certain age, I was warned by friends and family to isolate myself from others. I am a traveler. Traveling allows me to get pleasantly lost as I let everyday ordinariness and the already known disappear, waiting for something new and unexpected to appear. And since travel wasn’t possible, I turned to my archives, trying to find ways to cope with isolation, my disconnection from the outdoors, and the increased disorder of our culture. I spent hours looking through prior work, much of it photographs of nature from places I have been to that resonated with me and offered solace and emotional comfort. (Bhutan, Iceland, Japan, Cape Cod, Namibia, and California, to name a few). Over time I began to see the repetitiveness of compositional elements in my landscapes and began to play with connecting aspects of a component from one location to another. I