THAW, opening Sept 21st

I'm very excited to announce the opening of THAW, an exhibition featuring the work of Adam Benjamin Fung, Amy Sacksteder, and myself. This will be the first exhibition I've put together/curated from the ground up. Read on for more info!

The world is changing, warming, mutating. Weather patterns shift and grow unpredictable. Glaciers disappear and snow fails to accumulate; permafrost liquefies for the first time in an epoch. The part humans have played in this undeniable change is more and more evident on a daily basis. Yet, not only do human societies and institutions seem incapable of responding adequately to the situation, many are unable to even think the changes that are now shaping the future of life on this planet. The becoming-geological implied by the Anthropocene opens up a view on a human relationship with the Earth that has transmuted into something unrecognizable.

THAW attempts to bring together artists whose work touches on the wildly divergent consequences of the Anthropocene and climate change--those attempting, in their own fragmentary ways, to meet the demand climate change poses to human thought: the loss associated not only with melting ice caps and glaciers, with the destruction of habitats and the altering of coastlines; but the loss of geological and ecological naivete, the loss of narratives of human control of the environment, and the end of the belief that human beings stand apart from the world they live in. French theorist Bruno Latour refers to global warming as ‘climate mutation’, perhaps a more apt term: implying not only an unpredictable future on this planet’s surface, but one potentially more strange than any current model can predict. The works included in this exhibition contribute new dimensions to the visual imaginary of a world irreversibly altered in the Anthropocene: some through quiet and spare contemplation of intimately linked networks, others registering the incoherence, acceleration, and fractured scales of this mutating world.   

In his review of Jeff Vandermeer’s 2017 novel Borne, Steven Shaviro writes

The Anthropocene means that “we” (human beings) have irreversibly altered the entire biosphere; but it also means that, in doing so, we have exposed ourselves, more fully and more nakedly than ever before, to the geological and biological forces that respond to us in ways that we cannot anticipate or control.

Through the work of visual artists Adam Fung, Lucas Korte, and Amy Sacksteder, THAW attempts to further the recognition of those geological and biological forces, to reckon with an Earth that does not exist totally ‘for us’, as well as what it means to seriously contend with such a realization. Paintings, drawings, video and installation act as indexes for prolonged thinking about this melting, mutating ground we walk on.

The show will open Thursday Sept 21st with a reception from 5:30-7:30pm and run until Nov 17th. The Notre Dame Center for Arts and Culture is located at 1045 W. Washington St. South Bend IN, 46601