Exhibition:
POST-POSTHUMAN

Exhibition: POST-POSTHUMAN

Post-Posthuman explores modes of artistic inquiry that point away from the apocalyptic rhetoric of our time and toward a vision of an era of renewed kinship with the Earth.

Granting agency and intelligence to all of nature, the artists in this show work collaboratively with their materials, celebrating the wonder of physics and the contingency of all things.

Political theorist Jane Bennett speaks of the “vibrant energy” and “thingly power” of inanimate matter. Ecophilosopher David Abram speaks of the “more than human“ gestures, actions and reactions that constitute the majority of the earth’s activity. The great polymath and theoretician Freeman Dyson cites circumstance and contingency, the act of one event playing on another, as the primary factor in determining the shape of the world.

Today even industry is forging partnerships with nature. Scientist Janine Benyus formed her consultancy, Biomimicry 3.8, to help industry leaders find design solutions by studying processes found in nature. “Nature is our mentor,” Benyus says — not our resource.

Conjuring these ideas, the artists in this show are in intimate dialogue with the Earth. There is an embrace of the unknown and a willingness to share authorship of their work. For these artists, the idea of co-creating with the Earth is a social, ethical, and political act – one that heralds the end of human exceptionalism and advances a new way of being in the world.

Xavi Bou

Bou has developed a process to track and capture birds in flight through a unique photographicprocess. His Ornithographies moves away from the scientific approach of chronophotography used by photographers like Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey. The scene is not invasive; moreover, it rejects the distant study, resulting in organic form images that stimulate the imagination. What develops is a ballet of imagery, capturing the language of flocking, soaring and gliding, transformed into abstractions in a landscape of sky and terrain. www.xavibou.com

Daniel Hill

Hill’s work explores the relationship between vision and sound and the power of this connection to generate compelling visual environments. His paintings are process oriented and employ a generative rules-based system with the notion of embodied/extended cognition being an integral aspect. His various inquiries are grounded in a strong interest in the ideas and methodology of science, both of which serve as the conceptual underpinning of his work.  www.danielhill.netwww.xavibou.com

Ed Kerns

Ed Kerns’ process paintings from his Organic Abstraction series are based on genetic coding structure and development found, for example, in shell formation, where markers determine pattern growth. Kerns’ work references biologist Stephen Meyer’s research from his 2010 Signature in the Cell.

In Kerns’ process, layer upon painted layer reacts to what was laid down before, with no obvious intention or bias, only curiosity and action. Kerns uses outside sources and spontaneously determined rules to dictate how and where the next layer of marks are laid. The work develops organically with no predetermined outcomes or expectations. edkernsart.com/

William Lamson

Lamson has often created his own devices, “rudimentary contraptions” that set up opportunities for external forces to create their own performative expression. Early videos in the exhibition are exemplary of the many tests, practices and notes that Lamson has made over the years. In his Mineral Terrain works, Lamson encourages salt formations to grow on glass. The repeated process of flooding and evaporation represents an accelerated geology. www.williamlamson.com

Pete Mauney

Photographer Pete Mauney takes to the landscape at night, and using highly sensitive photographic processes, records the paths of fireflies and other insects, inhabitants of the night sky. His process allows scale and action to redefine our expectations in ways that undermine our previous knowledge and expectations of the world we accept as predictable and known. www.petemauney.com

Daria Panichas

Panichas explores our normative world by diving deeply into its roots, obscuring reference and celebrating texture and form. The resulting work is not unrecognizable, yet the viewer’s pause stalls in search for purchase, finding recognition only after prolonged examination, or sometimes not at all. Panichas creates an opportunity to set the viewer free of any shackle that binds us to the ordinary, instead, releasing one into a less anticipated world. www.panichas.com

Leah Raintree

Raintree’s work is rooted in an experimental drawing practice that spans media, with projects developing through a combination of process-based mark-making and direct engagement with materiality and place. Her series, which range from ceramic pieces to drawings to cameraless photographic works, explore interrelationships between human and geologic scales as well as nonhuman geological forces that wholly exceed us. www.leahraintree.com

Taney Roniger

Roniger’s work explores primal forms, or forms found in the natural world that evoke our earliest evolutionary origins. Working with large-scale drawings made with charcoal and graphite, she creates luminous fields of soft geometry that, while abstract, elicit a visceral recognition of these ancestral homes. In working with these forms, her interest is in generating a sense of our continuity with nature: a deeply felt reminder that, whatever else we are, we are ultimately beings born of the earth and cosmos. www.concatenations.org

Jim Toia

Toia engages processes and structures in nature in a wide variety of ways of approaches. His mushroom spore drawings, which he has been making for decades, capture the blind process of mushroom spore broadcasting. Microscopic spore are ejected from a mushroom’s gill at the speed and intensity which it takes for a spaceship to break the earth’s atmosphere. Yet, having no mass, the spore quickly become suspended in the air and quickly surrender to whatever minute air currents might be present. The resulting patterns captured on the paper are unique events, never to be repeated again, but captured permanently for our contemplation. This, and all of Toia’s explorations, are occupied by the powers of circumstance and contingency, as well as the hidden powers and structures unbeknownst to our ordinary comings and goings. www.jimtoia.com