Apocalypse Diet: What Will We Eat – Gallery Guide

GALLERY GUIDE

FEBRUARY 21 — JUNE 7, 2020 GUEST CURATED BY STELLA MARRS JANE ADAMS SUZANNE ANKER ANDREA HAENGGI ELLIE IRONS & ANNE PERCOCO LI SUMPTER CANDACE THOMPSON

Andrea Haenggl, Asphalt Cut-Outs for Staying with the Trouble: I remember it was cold, 2018

Apocalypse Diet features the work of seven artists responding to climate change through the lens of food. Using video, performance, sculpture, social practices, and printed matter, these artists work in the space between what is and what might be. Their imaginative constructions encourage us to considering alternative ecological relationships. Their work creates openings for generative new thinking in this critical time of 24/7 disaster weather reports.

Andrea Haenggi (Brooklyn, NY), a dancer by training, gestures poetically toward the essence of Apocalypse Diet with her documentation-performance video Asphalt Cut-Outs for Staying with the Trouble: I remember it was cold (2018).

In this work, Haenggi greets her last day of a rented studio with a final definitive action of chiseling the asphalt, and ‘freeing’ it from the substrate below. Nude, in 40 degree weather, she is “thinking with” cultural theorist Donna Haraway to stay with the trouble. The intimacy of her flesh acknowledges the petrochemical material as she sacrifices her body’s comfort. The artist invites herself and the viewer to:

Attend to land that has been traumatized, to the soil compressed under the asphalt. We face our own complicity in the socio-cultural structures that made it possible even preferable, to take this life-giving substrate and lock it away under pavement. 1

With the sound of Haenggi’s insistent hammering, we enter a world of a multitude of women who are responding to our troubled world with unacknowledged individual actions of care and labor.

1 Haenggi

Jane Adams, Aquaponic Diorama, 2020 (detail of wall graphic)

Like Haenggi, Candace Thompson’s (Brooklyn, NY) project The Collaborative Urban Resilience Banquet (The C.U.R.B.) thinks through the work of Donna Haraway and Robin Kimmerer that rearranges our relationships to all species as kin, in non-hierarchical value, with a reframed mindset that includes equity and compassion for living and dying together on this planet in this time. Kimmerer asks, “What if we took the indigenous worldview?” The ecosystem is not a machine, but a community of sovereign beings, subjects rather than objects.”2 Calling on the plants as her guides and teachers, and asking “what can we learn from Amaranth?”, Thompson’s work is in continual exploratory development.

Her process and research for The C.U.R.B. can be found online at thecurb.earth and on Instagram @the_c_u_r_b.

As components of Apocalypse Diet, Thompson contributes a video and hosts a seasonal “Resilience Banquet.” The banquet combines an urban walking tour, weed plant identification class, and cooking school with a science experiment.

She mashes together the boundaries of multiple disciplines simultaneously to produce a program that generates new local knowledge and community dialogue on local wild plants, toxicity, and responsibility.

Thompson’s next C.U.R.B. takes place on Saturday, May 2, 2020 at 405 Pine Street in the back parking lot behind BCA studios. Bring a plastic baggie with a cup of soil if you would like to test your garden dirt for heavy metals: there will be an outpost set up from the USDA that can scan and interpret the results for you.

2 Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, page 331

The aesthetic of collaborative community building and social practice gestures continues with the work of The Next Epoch Seed Library (NESL) by Ellie Irons (Brooklyn and Troy, New York) and Anne Percoco (Jersey City, New Jersey) who have been working together and creating pop-up seed libraries with an urban weed focus since 2015. Peter Del Tredici writes:

The plants that grow spontaneously in urban areas–whether native or non-native–are performing important ecological functions. Ecologists refer to these functions as environmental services and they include excess nutrient absorption in the wetlands, heat reduction in paved areas, erosion control, soil and air pollution tolerance and remediation, food and habitat for wildlife, and food and medicine for people (even if we don’t use it).3

NESL is an installation of a small, seed library collection that shares alternative, visionary future possibilities for wild plants in the face of dramatic ecological loss. As the seeds are location-specific, the 2020 BCA edition holds wild weed seeds from Sears Lane, in Burlington, collected in August 2019.

Li Sumpter (Philadelphia, PA) is an artist and educator who identifies as a Mythologist. Working within genres of the Apocalypse and Afrofuturism, Sumpter creates stories that model resilience, survival, and identity for her community. She uses “art as a tool for social change.”4 In Apocalypse Diet, Sumpter presents work in three media that speak from the present and extend perspective and psychic comfort for surviving the future.

In her video Pop Prophecy: Black Farmers Are the Afrofuture, the farmers are matter of fact and speak to the African American experience of lived disaster as daily reality. This alarm is nothing new; this is a historic reality for black survival.

Working from original collages, the artist created two digital poster print enlargements of her Boom 4Real: Escape Artist Series, Jean Michel Basquiat.

Sumpter positions us with Basquiat’s question, “What are you going to do when things go Boom 4 Real?”. This early tagline of Basquiat frames his expressions of wonder and authority as he surveys the landscape and looks directly at us, from the Afrofuture.

Escape Artist Mixtape: Art of Survival is a handy zine5 checklist for preparing for disasters. It includes planning ideas, thinking through the details of system collapse, what to gather, and how to communicate and prioritize in the face of the unknown. The zine is available for sale at the BCA show, with partial proceeds going to support Sumpter’s Escape Artist Initiative from Myth Media Studios.

3 The Flora of the Future, Peter Del Tredici, page 3 [https://placesjournal.org/article/the-flora-of-the-future/?cn-reloaded=1] 2/11/2020 4 Eco-Activisim in the Age of the Multiverse | Li Sumpter | TEDxCheltenham [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssqt5x9M4ZU] 2/11/2020 5 A pre-internet self-produced pamphlet usually printed on a borrowed Xerox machine in a corporate setting while working for the man or on downtime.

Suzanne Anker, Astroculture (Eternal Return), 2018

Jane Adams’ (Colchester, VT) Aquaponic Diorama and Suzanne Anker’s (New York, NY) Astroculture (Eternal Return) are installations that are speculative, model infrastructures for localized food production. Adams’ Aquaponic Diorama presents us with an idea that our domestic infrastructure could house a living system of circulating fluids, functioning as an in-house aquaponic garden scaled to each person’s growing needs. Her logic is that we expect a stove or sink, why not the addition of an in-house garden? By re-engaging with a five year-old child’s imagination of a playhouse, Adams presents a home remodel that also offers a possibility for reducing petroleum consumption. Lettuce grown and trimmed in the kitchen removes the thousand-mile drive to the dinner table.

Suzanne Anker is a bioscience artist and the founder of the Bio Art Lab at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She is leading an experimental program that joins the objectives of art and bioscience, opening up new ways to see and think about matter, and training the next generation of bioscience artists.

Apocalypse Diet includes the fuchsia altar of Astroculture (Eternal Return).

Built on NASA’s research on growing food in outer space, the plants within the work thrive on the red and blue spectrum of light through the process of photosynthesis. Astroculture (Eternal Return) is constructed from off-the-shelf LED panels and readymade aluminum cubicles. The work might be interpreted to suggest what would happen if we no longer could depend on sunlight. How precious are growing plants? As we watch species extinctions, the off-the-shelf materiality of LED panels aesthetically references the capitalism that brings us an electrical, triage emergency to feed ourselves.

Responding to the incessant media waves of fear about future climate change, the seven artists in Apocalypse Diet: What Will We Eat? reach to reframe humanity’s relationship to life and each other by responding with personal engagement, embodied responsibility, and generative, educational actions, so as to foment a culture of constructive survival thinking. These artists are a just a fraction of a multitude of women artists responding with individual actions of care and labor to our troubled world.

Stella Marrs, Guest Curator

CITY HALL PARK

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CHECKLIST 1. JANE ADAMS Aquaponic Diorama, 2020 4'10" x 3' diameter Wood, metal, acrylic, vinyl, silicone, electrical wiring, slip ring, motors, pump, sensors, microcontroller, expanded clay, sand, vegetation, fish, water.

2. SUZANNE ANKER Astroculture (Eternal Return), 2015 6' x 6' x 6' Vegetable producing plants grown from seed using LED lights, galvanized steel cubes, plastic, red and blue LED lights, plants, water, soil and no pesticides 3. ANDREA HAENGGI Asphalt Cut-Outs for Staying with the Trouble: I remember it was cold, 2018 24" x 24" (12" x 15" hexagonal piece of asphalt) One hexagonal asphalt cut-out, chisel, hammer, iPhone with video/sound, gravel 4. ELLIE IRONS AND ANNE PERCOCO The Next Epoch Seed Library (NESL), 2015-present Dimensions Variable Wall mounted installation with shelves and grow lights, small library structure, multiple microscopy photos and wall ephemera

5. LI SUMPTER Pop Prophecy: Black Farmers Are the Afrofuture Edition, 2017 Single-channel video (4:32 min) Boom4Real: Escape Artist Series, Jean Michel Basquiat, 2019 44" x 61" each (two prints) digital print Escape Artist Mixtape: Art of Survival Zine Vol 3, 2019 digital print on paper, volume 3 of 4 For Sale: $12* *partial proceeds go to support the Escape Artist Initiative a project of the Culture Trust

6. CANDACE THOMPSON The C.U.R.B (Collaborative Urban Resilience Banquet), 2018-present Single-channel video (10 min)

All works Courtesy of the Artist

GALLERY PUBLIC PROGRAMS GUEST CURATOR TALK: STELLA MARRS Wednesday, March 25, 2020, 6-7:30 pm BCA Center, 135 Church Street APOCALYPSE DIET PRESENTS THE C.U.R.B THE COLLABORATIVE URBAN RESILIENCE BANQUET Saturday, May 2, 2020, 1–3 pm BCA Studios, 405 Pine Street FAMILY ART SATURDAY Fourth Saturday of Each Month February 22, March 28, April 25, and May 23, 11 am-1 pm BCA Center, Fourth Floor, 135 Church Street ART & CONVERSATION Wednesday, March 11 and May 13, 9:30–11 am BCA Center, 135 Church Street

Apocalypse Diet: What Will We Eat? is the second guest curated exhibit of BCA Center’s Artist’s Artists series, which offers insights into contemporary art by inviting Vermont artists to guest curate intriguing and challenging work that has influenced their creative practice.

BCA Exhibitions are funded in part by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Vermont Arts Council.

BURLINGTON CITY ARTS 135 CHURCH STREET BURLINGTON, VERMONT, 05401 BURLINGTONCITYARTS.ORG