Kelly Xi – SAIC Graduate Exhibition 2023

SAIC SHOWS 2023 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2023 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Kelly Xi

Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Art and Technology Studies

Graduate Exhibition One (March)

kellyxi.art@gmail.com

xikel.xyz

Material ecology-minded artist and writer Kelly Xi engages intimately with the emissive materiality of digitization. Her research interests wade the petro-porous condition we share with more-than-human life and culture an embodied stake in mutual survival via the gut, “waste”, and wavelength.

Kelly Xi is a transplant of Baotou, Inner Mongolia, the world’s largest supplier of rare earth metals powering illuminant technologies, screens, mobile electronics, turbines, and electric engines. Her hometown is the site of the Baogang Tailings Dam, a radioactive cesspool visible from space, operated by the Bayan Obo mine. In 2021, her biodesign work on the mycelial biopolymer PermaPak won the Barilla Prize for Regenerative Living Ecosystems and was published in Issues of Science and Technology. She has exhibited at MdW Fair, The Wrong Biennale, and Selenas Mountain.

Kelly Xi - Exoskeletons for Photic Current performance

Exoskeletons for Photic Current performance, 2022, Outdoor performance at Companion Co-Op. Photo courtesy of Companion Co-Op

Kelly Xi - Organelles of Extrahuman Timescale

Organelles of Extrahuman Timescale, 2022, Ceramic decomposer habitats, food waste and packaging compost, invertebrates. Photo courtesy of Kevin Briggs

Kelly Xi - Organelles of Extrahuman Timescale

Organelles of Extrahuman Timescale, 2022, Ceramic decomposer habitats, food waste and packaging compost, invertebrates. Photo courtesy of Kevin Briggs

Kelly Xi - Exoskeletons for Photic Current

Exoskeletons for Photic Current, 2022, Recycled glass, mineral phosphors, electronic transformer, stoneware. Photo courtesy of Eugene Tang

Kelly Xi - Exoskeletons for Photic Current

Exoskeletons for Photic Current, 2022, Recycled glass, mineral phosphors, electronic transformer, stoneware. Photo courtesy of Eugene Tang

alien_criticality, 2021, Video, 05:24 min.

A machinima work displants viewers into a synthetic world. Born as a water caltrop imbued with light-catching agency and aural magnetism, you navigate wind-chapped, ever-rarifying ground. Some invisible force insists, “We make the world we possess. If we make our collective voices heard loud enough, it is inevitable that we move away from choices toxic to our survival.” You know nothing of this human concern. You are a de-pigmented seedpod.

Benthos of the Synthetic Suns, 2022, Video, 17:06 min.

What will we socially decide about the existence of a billionaire class positioned to threaten collective survival for their short-term gain?

I’m most interested in the active metabolism of materiality. Through embodied storytelling, I aim to advocate for direct alliances with the organisms that support our ability to live.

In my neon practice working with light as a tactile medium, I electrify glass light sculptures by filling recycled glass from student scrap with noble gas, which ionize and emit light under current. I harness the ultraviolet wavelengths to encourage the activity of microorganisms such as diatom algae and cyanobacteria metabolizing in waterways and soil.

I 3D print ceramic decomposer habitats to scale and circulate nutrients from aerobic breakdown by springtails, pillbugs, earthworms, and fungi. We can conceive differently what we regard as waste by acknowledging common benefits shared by nonhuman agents. Collaboration with aerobic microbes and invertebrates supports nutrient cycling, water retention, biodiversity, and ecological resilience.

Because I am a digital practitioner from a mining town, conscious of both restorative and extractive land practices, I consider the practice of shaping glass for lucent wavelength an embodied turn from the screen. To tense and slacken the groove for photic current by breath and motion, to powder-dust the tube with the mineral phosphors doped to fluoresce, evoke intimate wariness for their function in upwardly-large or ocularly-intimate LED displays. The ubiquity of screens as intimate appendage, to the resource-intensive detriment of landscapes and landfills, demanded a counter pathway. My practice became that reconciliation. I hope the extended community that visits the work is tickled to seek more-than-human collaborators in ways that enrich their own lives.

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