The public can visit the gallery at 1740 Broadway St. Tuesday through Friday from 11AM to 5PM, and Saturdays from 1PM to 5PM. August 6 – September 14, 2021. Or listen to our interview together.

In Tiahue Tocha (let’s go home) Colectivo Rasquache continues its project of engaging with transborder reality through material and social invention, this time with particular attention to brickmaking as a homage and timeline of Coapan. As construction methods in Mexico have evolved, brick-making, which, along with farming, was the primary occupation of many from Coapan who have since migrated to the US, gave way to cement block. Cement blocks are not made from local materials unlike red bricks or adobe bricks. For our installation at Visible Records, the red clay of Virginia provides fresh material for old ways of making as we ask:

• What new things are built when we are apart?  
• What opportunities arise out of absence or restriction? 
• What possibilities might make themselves known that otherwise would never have been?
• How do we share them?
• What happens when nostalgia gives way to futurity?

The workshop I did with Ken Rinaldo was called “Unmaking with Worms”. Participants built mini sculptures and placed them into a baby bassinet where composting worms live. Our building materials were food and paper waste; egg cartons and discarded vegetables sourced from the compost pile of a nearby community garden. During the workshop, we explored how worm ecosystems “unmake” waste matter and “remake” it into fertile compost.

During the run of the exhibition, a time-lapse camera is capturing the transformation of the sculptures. Looking forward to seeing the worms work!

Opening webinar event
November 12, 2020, 12:00–1:00pm PST (3:00-4:00pm EST)
Register for Zoom link here

My new project, Vegetal Entangling is a multimedia webpage love-letter to plants. It reflects on human-plant relationships and documents my practice of “plant noticing”. This exhibition, which asks, What Makes Us Human? provides a great context for my project:

Some of the inquiry conducted by these collaborators examines what it means to be something other than human, simultaneously helping reveal what makes us human. How do we talk about our humanness? Which of our taxonomies intersect? And how can (virtual) space facilitate more of these intersections? How are humans furthering creative, scientific, and scholarly research while responding to the pandemic in our institutions, in our bodies, in our environments and in our communities? How can researchers be alone together and work collectively — questioning, testing, and collaborating during COVID to educate communities at the intersection of art, culture, science, and politics? 

Curated by Jennifer Parker, artist and professor of Art and Digital Arts & New Media at the University of California Santa Cruz, this exhibition showcases the multifaceted approach of artists, humanists, and scientists working across disciplines to investigate art and genetics. Spearheaded by OpenLab Collaborative Research Center in collaboration with the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery in the Arts Division, UC Santa Cruz.

Collaborators:
A.M. Darke, Alexa Burrell, Amy Youngs, Angélica Dass, ASSIST Lab, Avital Meshi, Brad Necyk, Center for Public Philosophy, Danielle Siembieda, Dorothy Santos, Enrique Leal, the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, Gina Czarnecki, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Jenny Reardon, Jessie Kendall-Bar, Karolina Karlic, OpenLab Collaborative Research Center, UC Santa Barbara Gaucho OpenLab Initiative, Paloma Medina, Phylum (Carlos Castellanos, Johnny DiBlasi, Bello Bello), The Algae Society, The Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History, UCSC Astrobiology, UCSC Earth Futures Initiatives, UCSC Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Zac Zimmer, Zach Corse

The artists in the show are:

Suzanne Anker
Ruth K. Burke
Katie Caron Adrienne DeLoe
Anna Dumitriu
Ana Maria Hernando
Luke Jerram
Ken Rinaldo
Regan Rosberg
Jennifer Delilah Trammell
Amy M. Youngs

Go visit it online.

In his podcast, Voices of Excellence, he asked me many great questions about my art and teaching practices. You’ll hear me talking about my recent work with virtual reality, augmented reality and about how living with worms has influenced me. We also discuss interdisciplinary teaching, creativity, eco art, bio art, art & science and art & technology.

My interview is on Soundcloud and on Apple iTunes.

And you can listen to all of the Voices of Excellence interviews on this regular podcast on Soundcloud or iTunes. They focus on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at the Ohio State University.

We are creating Machine Garden, a system sculpture in which plants, worms, microbes, and machines will coexist in a state of symbiotic intertwining. Food waste will be transformed into fertilizer in a worm hive composter, which provides connections to the plants via a highway of interconnected tubes that allow worm migration throughout.

We are building this work as 2017 Researchers-in-residence at the innovative Media, Research and Commercialization Center. This is an incredible facility outfitted with a variety of tools and equipment, including a full shop, 3D printers and 3D scanner, computer-controlled machine tools, a cutting and engraving laser, plastic vacuum former, large format printers, a range of design and production software, electronics workbenches, video and still cameras, audio recording and mixing equipment, and a variety of tools for supporting interactive environments and installations.

Abstract: Materialism is occupying the forefront of intellection discourse in fields as diverse as anthropology, architecture, social science, cultural theory, feminist studies, philosophy, psychology, and theology. These disciplines are both defining and redefining humanity’s interactions with the materials of the planet. Their shared impulse can be traced to mounting evidence that humanity’s unprecedented abilities to manipulate substances, from nanoparticles to global weather, are undermining Earth’s ability to support diverse forms of life. The following text contributes to this urgent discourse by applying these considerations to individual behaviors. In order to facilitate personal scrutiny of the environmental consequences of one’s material behaviors, it identifies seven archetypes of material interaction: pet, sacred object, hazard, merchandise, specimen, resource, and sensual stimulus. In this essay, each archetype is presented from three vantage points. First, patterns of human engagement with each archetype and their environmental consequences are examined. Second, patterns of disposing materials that are no longer desired or viable are explored. Third, artists’ interpretations of these material patterns are presented. Each artwork utilizes dirt as its medium and theme to facilitate comparing and contrasting archetypes. Artists not only manifest each archetype, they warn against objectionable human/material relationships and demonstrate beneficial alternatives.

Article excerpt: “Youngs then inserted a communication channel between these divergent territories by installing an infrared camera inside the worm bag. The images were then transmitted to an LCD screen that was inserted into the top of the table, enabling Youngs to observe the worms’ virtuoso waste-disposal performances as they ate together. A second repulsion-reducing strategy involved adding an active care-giving regimen to the diner’s passive viewing of images on an LCD screen. Youngs accomplished this by inserting a cavity into the top of the table that functioned as a waste-disposal receptacle for pizza crusts, apple cores, and used tea bags. All her leftovers immediately provided the menu for the worms’ next meal. This built-in receptacle converted a tedious chore of waste management into the pleasurable act of feeding a pet.”

…read in full here.