Artists

EARTHLY OBSERVATORY

AUGUST 30 – DECEMBER 3, 2021

Earthly Observatory explores how we sense, portray, and engage our deep planetary entanglements. Through crafted visions, close listening, and histories of conquest and protest, the exhibition examines the contested relations of ecology to economy, aesthetics to ethics that dominate our experience at one moment, and evades awareness in the next. Drawn from diverse practices across art, design, and the natural sciences, the works invite us to question the ways that we—as one among many earthlings—create our understanding of a manifold world.

Conditions Of Representation

How do we generate earthly knowledge and how do disciplinary lenses define what we see? Every act of seeing is an entangled instant in which two things manifest at once: what something is, together with what we imagine something to be. As artists reconfigure the relations between materialities and meanings, the boundaries between objectivity and subjectivity blur, revealing the complicated conditions of natural history in a post-natural world.

View the Gallery Guide

Programs

September 21, 6:00 PM—8:00 PM

Ethics of Observation

Mark Dion and Zoé Strecker
in conversation with Giovanni Aloi and Andrew S. Yang
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
6:00 PM–7:30 PM
Via Zoom Webinar

This panel examines our reliance on realism as a means through which truth about the natural world, and its assigned value, has been historically formulated. More recently, contemporary artists have been reconsidering the expressive potential of materiality in an attempt to blur notions of natural and artificial. What is “real” if knowledge is ultimately a matter of perception or representation, and how might an ethics of observation help make sense of this question?

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October 9, 10:30 AM—12:00 PM

Acknowledging Place, Acknowledging Peoples

Saturday, October 9, 2021
10:30 AM–12:00 PM
Via Zoom Webinar

How do practices of land acknowledgment that honor deep historical connections of Indigenous peoples to colonially settled territories take shape? This event brings together artists, scholars, curators, and activists to critically examine the intersections of art, activism, place, and identity.

• Artist Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds
• Dr. John Low (OSU Newark Earthworks Center)
• SAIC’s ARC Land Acknowledgment Subcommittee
• Earthly Observatory curators Giovanni Aloi and Andrew S. Yang.

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November 17, 6:00 PM—7:30 PM

Material Thinking

Rena Detrixhe, Erin Wiersma, and Nandipha Mntambo
in conversation with Giovanni Aloi and Andrew S. Yang.
Wednesday, November 17, 2021
6:00 PM–7:30 PM
Via Zoom Webinar

Artists and scholars are embracing the idea that materials are not passive or inert, but that they brim with unique characters, histories, and qualities that must be recognized and respected. This panel will engage the vitality of matter in art at a time in which truths put forth in meta-narratives of colonialism and free-market fundamentalism are beginning to crumble. The New Materialist turn can be seen as a creative move away from anthropocentric conceptions of nature, a move that acknowledges how “being human” essentially is a collaborative process where other forms of life and non-life play defining roles.

The program is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities requesting accommodations should visit saic.edu/access.

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Featuring

Conditions Of Representation

Programs