Photo credit NYC Culture Club
Essay below by Terri C. Smith for How to Know What We Know: New Experiences in the Holocene, Curated by LABitate for NYC C Culture Club, Focus Art Fair, May 9th -May 12th, 548 22nd St. New York, NY.
While the most dramatic and exploitative damage to the planet arguably began during the industrial revolution, humans have been altering the Earth at lower decibels since prehistoric times. For instance, our current period “Holocene”—in Greek hólos, means “whole,” and kainós, means “new”—began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age and corresponds with the rapid proliferation of humans and our increasing impact on the planet. In How to Know What We Know: New Experiences in the Holocene, artists investigate aspects of this era’s environmental impact, exploring complex ecological dynamics through strategies such as re-presenting them, learning from them, and positing solutions that may mitigate damage done to them. In many cases, these artists take to heart Sol LeWitt’s line from Sentences on Conceptual Art (1968)—“Rational judgements repeat rational judgements…illogical judgements lead to new experience”—creating dynamic, often quasi-scientific works that encourage inquiry, discussion, observation, and experimentation.
One distinctive quality of How to Know What We Know is the centering of living entities—from microbes to large and small emergent systems—including fungi, Kombucha SCOBY, ants, goldfish, oyster reefs, birds, and forests. In the case of works by Nedko Bucev, Carlos Castellanos, Elizabeth Demaray, Laziza Rakhimova, and Danielle Siembieda-Gribben, the organisms are alive and are often growing in real time. This brings dynamic, sometimes invisible life into the commercial context of an art fair. In Bucev’s wall works, the precarity of water quality and how the treatment of polluted water so often is determined by race and class biases is made visible. With the wall work “W like Water” (2021), a goldfish swims in clean water; however, with just a tip of the painting, tainted water could leak into the fish’s side of the orb. In “DisWater Glass” (2022), water from a wealthy New Jersey neighborhood is in one side of the glass and water from a less affluent neighborhood five miles away is on the other side of the glass. As they age together over time, the previously invisible water pollution is revealed via a green film. Bucev’s interest in these themes began at his home in New Jersey: “About five years ago, I sent my water to get checked and they discovered the water in my house had lead even though everything is new, but a small piece of pipe between street and my house was lead. And even if [after fixing that] the water finally seems safe, something like the recent earthquake here can put everything out of balance again.”
The environmental rebalancing of New York City’s artificial oyster reefs is the focus of Laziza Rakhimova’s commissioned, untitled work that pairs oyster shells with mirrors. The artist describes the sculpture’s inspiration and symbolism: “Drawing inspiration from Robert Smithson’s iconic work ‘Mirror and Crushed Shells,’ my installation seeks to create a dialogue between nature and artifice, reflecting on our relationship with the natural world and the impact of human intervention.” In addition to her sculpture, Rakhimova is exhibiting “Resilient Wall” (2022), an infrared C-print of an artificial oyster reef. She writes that this photo, “embodies the very essence of wave attenuation, waterfront fortification, erosion mitigation, and the nurturing of a rich, diverse marine life.” Danielle Siembieda-Gribbin’s “Kombucha Takeover” features a Kombucha SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) that is cradled in red stones, lending an unearthly glow. Also on view is the artist’s augmented reality video titled “Jean Gnome,” which utilizes a custom IG filter and performance to further explore what she describes as “hybrid relationships among science, machines, animals, politics, nature and people.”
Also employing living material, Elizabeth Demaray and Carlos Castellanos contribute works that undo damage done by pollutants. Demaray’s work “Home Is Where the Plastic Eating Stomach Is” (2019), features a sculpture made from clear plastic and in the shape of a stomach, intestines, and an esophagus. Hovering in the gallery, it is filled with small pieces of plastic at various stages of decomposition. Demaray explains that a type of digestion is happening inside sculpture, “Mushrooms are loaded with enzymes. They can eat, digest, utilize consumer plastics.” The project uses information derived from research at the John Dighton Lab at Rutgers University, and according to the artist, “this open source design suggests that we may be able to re-envision our consumer waste cycle by expanding the habitat of white rot fungi into our domestic living spaces.” Also featuring white rot fungi, her small sculpture “Cookbook for When the Sun Goes Out, Mentin Adolfo” (2023) is on view. To form it, the artist used a one-gallon milk container as a mold and combined the fungi with plastic she had on hand, including a fork from her lunch and a stolen Lego.
Similarly, Castellanos’ installation “Brownfield Tokenization Prototype” (2023-ongoing) is actively cleaning the environment on a small scale; however, the artist is also critiquing the implicit expectations of monetization that frequently go hand in hand with the concept of sustainability. According to Castellanos, this project:
…[explores the] tokenization and verification of environmental remediation processes and ecosystem services as art. Contaminated soil taken from a brownfield site in…Rochester, NY is used as a medium for generating cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) via bioremediation (the removal environmental pollutants using biological systems such as bacteria, fungi, or plants)….In a manner similar to the mining of gold for use as a medium of exchange, Brownfield Tokenization Prototype utilizes the remediating capabilities of bacteria and other microorganisms present in the soil as the marker of value.
With this project, Castellanos asks us to imagine new systems where local currency intersects with remediated toxic earth to create enlivened hubs of social and economic activity.
Mining for gold is explicitly leveraged in the informative and humorous ad “Alviso’s Urban Prospector” (2009) by Jon Cohrs. In it, Cohrs and others act out an infomercial for a modified metal detector that can find oil and toxins underground in the city by sensing gasses. Tongue-in-cheek, the actors extol the moneymaking potential of “mining” for oil. The video at once critiques the American pastime of excavating the land to make a quick buck and highlights how common it is to find toxins under the topsoil of city environs. With “Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt (2010), Cohrs and Morgan Levy create an ad for a medicinal salt product made from invisible elements in the water—the pharmaceuticals our bodies don’t absorb and that remain in sewage water even after its been extensively filtered. Similar to exhibiting artist Bucev, the invisible becomes visible but this time through a label listing ingredients. Cohrs and Levy’s commercial shares that some of this pharmaceutical residue ends up in San Francisco Bay area salt water. By excavating the salt, they are also excavating a mixture of more than one-dozen drugs, which they satirically hawk as a cure-all salt for everything from depression to bacterial infections.
Like Cohrs and Levy, the assemblage artist Faustin Adeniran and conceptual artist Mary Maddingly also employ found materials in their work. Adeniran often weaves aluminum strips cut from cans into his pieces, but works with materials ranging from fabric to found objects to tar. Much of his work attends to sociopolitical themes, especially his “Discarded” series, which according to the artist’s website “draws attention to the social, environmental, and economic impact of the Nigeria’s main export and source of revenue—crude oil.” The paintings on view here, “Elegance, 2024” and “Visible Mending 2024” are made of tar and aluminum cans and focus on what the artist describes as “healing and scars.”
Rather than making work from other people’s discarded items, many of Mary Mattingly’s sculptures are constructed by bundling together her own possessions. Images of those works and of Mattingly’s geodesic sculptures were featured in her photographic series “House and Universe,” which the artist describes as “an allegorical series of photographs that combined living systems like floating geodesic capsules with bundles of personal objects I collected and carried with me.” “Flock” (2013) is from this series and features two of Mattingly’s self-contained mobile habitats floating on a makeshift raft. Mattingly’s practice of bundling her possessions into large sculptures was also practiced on a smaller scale where, according to the artist, she combined “discarded objects together as a way to keep time.” Sculptures from her “Daily Bundles” series are also included in How to Know What We Know.
In works by Hugo Bastidas, David Brooks, Catherine Chalmer, Richard Klein, and Rob Reynolds, the intersection of human impact and natural environments inform subject matter, process, and materials to varying degrees. Like Mattingly, David Brooks is interested in building sustainable systems, but in the case of “Budding Bird Blind” it’s a system for birds. Commissioned by the Planting Fields Foundation for their estate’s bird sanctuary, the outdoor installation replicates part of a 100-year-old house visitors pass on the way to the sculpture, which functions as a bird blind—a shelter from which humans observe (and sometimes hunt) birds or other wildlife. Photographs of the installation are on view here and document the plantings (American tulip trees, flowering dogwoods, northern red oak, maples, and serviceberry trees) as they grow through the structure. According to an article on the project in Full Bleed, “The priority of the project gradually becomes inverted: what was at first a structure to observe birds from ultimately gives way to a habitat for the birds themselves. Initially, the human viewers are the spectators, but seasons later it will be the birds that are the lifelong spectators of this newfound situation.” To accomplish this, the artist will remove parts of the structure to allow for tree growth, dismantling it over a year’s time and leaving a robust bird habitat in its place.
Changing ecosystems also are a locus in Hugo Xavier Bastidas’ painting titled “Fountains.” From the artist’s “Codefication” series where he embeds black-and-white paintings with symbols and signifiers intermixed with and partially shrouded by shadow and light, “Fountains” depicts an earlier era of the World Trade Center site’s landscape. Bastidas’ oeuvre consists of black and white paintings—although he has been introducing hints of color in more recent works—and “Fountains” is indicative of the artist’s concern about the effects of globalization on the planet and our lives. With his small drawing of an iceberg titled “Albatross,” Los Angeles-based artist Rob Reynolds is also rendering nature in black and white and thinking about temporality. The artist, who often works directly with scientists and has traveled to the Arctic, sometimes uses 3-D computer generated imagery in his work. Here, the mix of laser-like squiggles and polygons (a basic geometry component in 3D modeling) suggest a computer model. Drawn with black carbon—defined by the Environmental Protection Agency as “the sooty black material emitted from gas and diesel engines, coal-fired power plants, and other sources that burn fossil fuel”—the material in which the image is rendered is made of the very substance that is causing its demise, infusing the work with allegorical heft.
How interactions between human activity and nature affect the environment are also mapped variously in the work of Catherine Chalmers and Richard Klein. With Klein’s sculptures, fungi are again a medium; but rather than actively altering plastic and dirt, they are sculptural forms that the artist combines with rusted, cast iron in “The Understory (Sharon Valley)” (2021) and with mirrors in “Half Life” (2022). With Klein’s work “The Understory,” Hemlock Varnish Shelf fungi are cast in reclaimed eighteenth and nineteenth century scrap iron and then combined with burnt 19th-century dentil crown molding. The work was originally made for an installation at ICEHOUSE Project Space in Sharon, Connecticut and is, in part, a response to histories of Iron production in that area and the woody fungi—a medium he’s incorporated into his work since the 1990s—that grows there. With “Half life,” actual Gilled Polypore Fungi line the edge of a mirror. In this work Klein sees the contrast of materials as metaphorical:
[The mirror is] a site of the divine or demonic, as an agent of lucidity or madness, or a vehicle for self-knowledge and/or vanity. Fungi also entertain opposites, functioning as life forms that are generative and critical to the heath of ecosystems, while simultaneously being the prime vector for decay in the organic world.
The habits and health of ecosystems is front and center in Catherine Chalmers pencil and watercolor drawings. From her “Queens of the World” series and dating 2010 and 2015, the two drawings on view track leaf cutter ant colonies in Costa Rica, with Chalmers noting what species they are and what they harvest, among other data. The unique ecological site she returned to for almost a decade allowed Chalmers to observe how different colonies interacted over time:
The incidents of leaf cutter ants is more common in disturbed environments. Someone had this piece of property and built cabinos and lodge. They planted a bunch of mango trees, and that configuration of plants and fruit trees was like a salad bowl for the ants. It allowed for a larger colony of leaf cutter ants than any other place I’ve been. I could access so many colonies and that’s why I could see the relationships between the two of them.
While there are scientific processes of observing and mapping at play, Chalmer also considers the symbolic possibilities of the colonies in terms of collaboration, communication, and hierarchies. The series’ title is an outgrowth of what she describes as her interest…
…in the idea of the imperialistic text and language we use on each other to impress superiority across tribes, countries, religions, etc. I wanted to use this language [which is pulled from cuneiform texts] for this project because as we’ve suppressed indigenous and minority people, we do this with the environment/nature.
Chalmers adds, “This is their world and in every one of these colonies there is a queen. She gives no orders. It’s an emergence system. These queens are part of the communication network versus ruling the colony.”
Like many of the works in How to Know What We Know, Chalmers is thinking intersectionality about the environment. This approach—our natural world as it interfaces with capitalism, AI, industrialization, remediation, race, class, and more—is found in each work on view. In this way, How to Know What We Know not only communicates the gravity of a global environmental crisis, but through these artists’ nuanced approaches, posits diverse points of view about the past in which the damage was done, what can be done in the present moment, and possible paths forward.
By Terri C. Smith, 2024
In my work with oysters, I used the ethereal medium of infrared light to capture the Governor’s island's landscape. Through this lens, I strive to convey not just the fragile beauty of the natural world but also its profound resilience, underscoring the urgent need for restoration.
Along the bustling waterfronts of New York City, artificial oyster reefs stretch, a testament to the ambitious Billion Oyster Project. These reefs serve as a dual purpose: to re-wild the urban waters and to shield the city from the relentless surges of floods.
The 'Resilient Wall’, embodies the very essence of wave attenuation, waterfront fortification, erosion mitigation, and the nurturing of a rich, diverse marine life. It stands as a beacon of hope, signaling the restoration of New York Harbor's natural protective embrace.
For millennia, the Indigenous peoples of this land practiced sustainable oyster harvesting, sourcing these bivalves exclusively from the shallow waters. Their wisdom echoes through time, reminding us of the sacred and potent nature of the oyster shell. These shells serve as guardians of our shorelines, agents of water purification, and vital players in the re-wilding of New York."
"Drawing inspiration from Robert Smithson's iconic work 'Mirror and Crushed Shells,' my installation seeks to create a dialogue between nature and artifice, reflecting on our relationship with the natural world and the impact of human intervention.
In this installation, a square mirror is positioned on the ground, reflecting the oyster midden. Surrounding the mirror oyster shells, meticulously arranged to form concentric patterns, reminiscent of midden formation.
The use of oyster shells not only pays homage to their importance in marine ecosystems but also serves as a metaphor for resilience and regeneration. Just as the oyster shell protects and nurtures life within, the installation symbolizes our duty to protect and restore our natural environment.
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