One does not need to understand the world to artistically express it. In fact, it seems that often the latter occurs in the terrifying moments when the former is revealed to be impossible. The inevitability of artistic expression thus, more often than not, reveals the smoky ruins of perception it rises from. And, in its potentially most potent moments, it aids us in imagining a world where they are redeemed. The process of scientific inquiry, despite its historical bureaucracies’ claims of infallibility, functions similarly.
As ever-digitizing technologies of ideology and extraction threaten us with climate destruction and fascism, there is an unavoidable importance to such a shared function. It made sense then when the Getty Museum’s inaugural “PST [Pacific Standard Time] Week,” a funding project that encourages Los Angeles art institutions to mount exhibitions inspired by a common theme, launched last summer with the prompt “Art & Science Collide.” The Brick, the new title of the nearly canonical nonprofit art space formerly known as LAXART, responded promptly.
Established in 2005 by Lauri Firstenberg and currently directed by Hamza Walker, The Brick has historically featured dense, intellectual curation. Its contribution to PST Week, titled Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism, is the first exhibition in its new space. The group show was curated by the gallery’s deputy director Catherine Taft and was initially the product of a research fellowship she received from the Warhol Foundation in 2018. With Life on Earth, Taft examines the traditions that have composed and influenced what we know as ecofeminism, a topic which embodies the theme of “Art and Science Collide” quite well. The exhibition not only explores such a synthesis, but questions the ideological basis of its constituent terms, specifically in relation to technology.
In her 1980 book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant, a foundational scholar in the evolving tradition of ecofeminism, defines what she calls the “mechanistic view of nature.” According to Merchant, through the Enlightenment and the resulting hegemony of humanism, the environmental perspective of the early centuries—the natural world as a living, feminine organism, i.e., “mother nature”—was replaced by a view that branded nature a force of uncontrollable death, chaos which could and must be tamed through mechanization.
In Merchant’s formulation, the mechanization of nature was the process of its categorization and eventual destruction through capitalistic thing-ification, which is to say its entry into the realm of commercial life: its ability to be bought and sold. Resultantly, what she deems as the “death of nature,” both epistemologically and literally, is the most far-reaching effect of the scientific revolution. Such a death, as others of her generation also argued, is of course not founded in an innocent, misplaced rationalism but rather in what Merchant calls “a framework of values based on power, fully compatible with the directions taken by commercial capitalism.”
Through this understanding, ecofeminists could approach gender and environmental violence as aspects of the same intricate ideological and material framework of power relations. Of course, this was not unique to Merchant’s thought or the ecofeminism movement itself. It was the call to action for an entire intellectual generation at the precipice of the discourse of “intersectionality.” As her contemporary Michel Foucault stated in his famous response to Kant’s What Is Enlightenment, “Humanism serves to color and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is after all obliged to take recourse.” The question thus becomes: How does one imagine while untangling thought, and, by extension, the self, from such an entrenched web of violences? And, furthermore, what is to be done with the proliferating technologies that continue to discombobulate and accentuate the context this struggle is defined by? The pieces in the Life on Earth exhibition participate in and react to this discourse, attempting to embody its relationship to a political reality increasingly defined by ecofeminism’s predictions and perspective.
When one exits the gentrification of the newly defined “Melrose Hill” section of L.A.’s Western Avenue and enters Life on Earth, they are greeted by the droning of multiple installations. Straight ahead is the main room of the gallery, which houses the majority of the exhibition, to the left is a wall piece by Margaret Morgan spelling out the exhibition’s name using twigs, sticks, and stones, and on the right lies a room dedicated to one of the stars of the show, A. L. Steiner.
Steiner’s photographic print collages, collectively titled Capitalism Does Not Care (for April Vendetta) (2024) are subtle in that initially they feel quite ordinary. Their form is ripe with a kind of aesthetic colloquialism that at first effaces any potential shock value. At first, the photos may appear no different than the webs of photographic mementos that line the walls of this country’s dorm rooms. But when examined closely, Steiner’s images are filled with a politically invigorated energy of being.
Aesthetically, the colors and arrangement denote a well-developed eye. They wear the walls of the room well, adorning them with what feels like a mini-universe of people, particularly femme people’s bodies, photos from protests, images of nature, performances, and parties. In this way Steiner’s photos are artifacts of the daily intersection between enjoyment, suffering, and political discontent. In a sense they respond to their title, answering the question embedded in its statement: If capitalism does not care, then who will? Steiner’s work responds: One’s community, and one’s self.
On the middle wall is a video installation titled To Chnge Evrythng (2023), which includes a performance by Sinead O’Connor, screenshots of texts, screen recordings of Steiner signing up for newsletters, nature, found-footage, news clips, extractive industry, clips of Steiner scrolling on her computer and social media, erotica, a poetry reading, trash dumps, etc. The combination of Steiner’s video piece and her photos form their own interrogative internal world, reflecting the ways in which the digitized ordinary can be laced with creative resistance and collective grieving.
There’s a lot of dense mixed-media work in Life on Earth: four video pieces that in their totality stretch close to two hours, a sound installation, and a TikTok-centric installation. The exhibition demands an extraordinary amount of attention and thought from the viewer, but the payoff is its intellectual breadth. Such a multifaceted form accentuates and grounds in the present what is, ultimately, an endlessly multifaceted topic with a dense history and canon. Life on Earth finds its lasting pertinence in its ability to interpolate, recontextualize, and imagine with the ecofeminist canon and its canonized objects of thought.
Upon walking into the main room of The Brick, I was immediately drawn to Alicia Piller’s totemic, multi-media installation Mission Control, Earthseed. Drawing from Octavia Butler’s Parable of The Sower—an Afrofuturist novel that follows a young woman named Lauren’s journey through post-apocalyptic America and transition into spiritual leader—the sculptural installation envelops itself (literally and figuratively) in “Earthseed,” the theology she calls forth. Internally decorated with headlines and notes taken from Lauren’s poetry that surround two chairs attendees can sit in, Mission Control, Earthseed (2024) functions as both a veneration of the text and its historical context as well as an archive of the decay chaos of hope they represent. Some highlights from the decorative references include a repeated note that reads: “God is teacher life / God is death / God is clay,” which sits adjacent to the more didactic headline: the poisoning of america.
Next to Piller’s installation stands the femme-led collective Alliance of the Southern Triangle’s installation piece Executive Order 27–1100100: Phase Change towards the Deluge (2024), a glowing, industrial box laden with flashing clips from social media and screaming, overlaid text that give theoretical body to the chaos. The social media clips center, somewhat messianically, around climate disaster in Florida and the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, which is facing potential destruction due to climate change. On the back of the box sits a geometric diagram with what appears to be a land mass transposed over it.
I appreciated the way this work approached the trend toward portraying the experience of social media in a gallery space. It felt like a successful attempt at physicalizing the chaotically inundating effects of digital media and the ways that catastrophe—ecological or not—folds into pornography in the context of a social media feed. Through its presentation, the installation allows for a re-experience of an intensity which for so many has sunk into the background.
Next to each other, Mission Control, Earthseed and Executive Order 27–1100100: Phase Change towards the Deluge participate in a process of inquiry that stretches backward and forward into time. One a meditation on an iconic, apocalyptic late-twentieth-century piece of literature, and the other focusing on digital media and the encroaching dystopian onslaught it bombards us with. The two are linked of course by their subject: the destruction of the environment and its sociopolitical intersections. Putting them in conversation thus gifts the viewer with a multi-pronged historical perspective, connecting the world of late modernity which Butler aimed to excavate, warn, and reimagine through her critical dystopia that hid utopian hues, and the digitized images which are simultaneously harbingers and enactors of decay.
The Institute of Queer Ecology is a self-described “ever-evolving collaborative organism” that has worked with countless artists with a focus on such technocentric investigations. Their contribution to the exhibition, a 2020 three-part video essay titled Metamorphosis, fits well into their oeuvre. Displayed on retro tv setups, the video’s aesthetic is coated with a cartoonish, eerie sense of nostalgia. Yet it is also forward thinking, both in its message and form. Through its use of CGI overlaid with home footage contextualized by monologues which connect the life of insects, ideas of queerness, and ecological theory with the violence of late capitalism and the general contemporary condition, Metamorphosis focuses on larvae’s development as an example of potential new ways of relation.
The nearby video installation Riparia (2024), by Lithuanian artist and filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė, is presented on a large screen in a tucked-away space. It is composed of shots that feature strikingly decorated serpent-humans staring into the camera while holding each other alongside montages of colored landscapes, abstract forms, and bodies of water generated by 3D modeling technology and underwater sensors. The film’s emotivity, achieved through its techno-surrealism, is breathtaking. The combination of VFX, makeup work, and wide shots of nature conjure an experience of the sublime I have rarely encountered through video art.
All these pieces employ technology in their process of imagining, which I admired. There are many threads of ecological discourse—ecofeminist or not—that, at least in certain ways, understandably view notions of techno-progress, and by association technology itself, as inherently violent due to its relationship to industry. Life on Earth, on the other hand, approaches technology as an inherent aspect of our reality, with a wide range of potentialities, showcasing pieces that explore the ways in which ecological advocacy, canon, and understanding in the twenty-first century are irrevocably related to technology.
Alongside the contemporary techno-centric installations, there are also several older and more traditional works in Life on Earth which participate in processes of memorialization. Masumi Hayashi’s series of photo collages from 1989 and 1990, for example, capture, complexify, and reimagine sacred and decaying landscapes in Ohio at the end of the last century. Composed of a multitude of smaller prints, Hayashi’s pieces are fractalized geographies of memory, as much rearrangements of the imagination as they are mournful confrontations with the reality of destruction. Industrial Excess Landfill, Ohio (1990), for example, eulogizes a piece of land that is the site of extreme decay, while Summer National, Deerfield Township, Ohio (1990) presents a vibrant scene of nature. Though not employing contemporary technologies that appear—in the present at least—extravagant and exciting, at the end of the century Hayashi’s pieces were potentially just as inventive and relevant.
Carolina Caycedo’s three sculptural installations titled Ñañay Kculli, S’oam Bawi Wenag, and Kiik K’úumhang hang in the back of The Brick like cocoons. Sitting in hand-woven nets, the three smooth seed sculptures look epic, and, in a certain sense, alien. Their beauty feels like a product of some kind of preserved purity—an ideal form from which hope can spring. To me, they felt close to futuristic. But, according to the work description, they are actually commemorative. Meant to memorialize the indigenous “three sisters” agricultural technique of growing squash, corn, and beans alongside each other, each sculpture is modeled and named after a historically significant species. The brown seed, for example, is meant to be a tepary bean, one of the most important native legumes in North American agriculture. In this way each sculpture participates in a process of research-based apotheosis. They are akin to monuments.
Next to Caycedo’s work, in the far-right corner, sits a large-scale printed installation of pages from Tabita Rezaire’s collaborative publication Womb Consciousness. An assemblage of contributions from friends of various artistic and intellectual backgrounds, the book and its hanging pages are a fitting end to a walkthrough of the show. On the wall, Womb Consciousness presents a digital collage of poetry, art, theory, and disparate sentences and phrases calling forth Afrofuturist, decolonial, and feminist ideas. The contemporary futurism incorporated within its pages makes it feel like a synthesis of Life on Earth’s two temporal bents, memorializing the form and ideas of ecofeminist canon while looking toward contemporary and future possibilities.
Accentuating Life on Earth’s density is an accompanying book set to be published by Inventory Press in 2025. Described as a “fully illustrated, scholarly publication, representing one of the first comprehensive, historical and critical overviews of ecofeminist art to date,” it will be edited by curator Catherine Taft and art historian Jane McFadden. The show includes the works of eighteen artists from around the world and across recent history. It is, ultimately, an epic intellectual endeavor on Taft’s part, one that attempts to synthesize generations of an evolving tradition while bringing it into the present, and perhaps more dauntingly, the future. And while at first Life on Earth can feel overwhelming, the more I sat with it, the more I found such an attempt moving.
Life on Earth is set to move to the art center West Den Haag in The Hague in 2025. Most likely, it will be well received there too. The exhibition finds its pertinence in the relevant breadth of its topic’s critical scope, and, if the events of the later part of 2024 are any indicator—climate disaster in Florida, Israel’s genocidal destruction of life and land in Palestine and Lebanon, and our escalating political psychosis most come to mind for me—such a scope is only going to become more relevant. This is, ultimately, what makes Life on Earth’s embodied inquiry so effective: its cavernous potency.
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Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism. An exhibition at The Brick, Los Angeles, 15 September–21 December 2024.
