Nicrocosms: Studies on Scavenging and Renewal
2023
Exhibition curated by Tracie Hayes at Bodega Bay Marine Lab
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See dew
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See Dew is a human-scale fog collector that takes the form of a Nicrophanous beetle pupa to explore how plants, animals, and humans adapt, collect, and navigate through mystic landscapes of fog. See Dew focuses on seeing what the place does and how the body is embedded in that being.
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Nicrocosms: Studies on scavenging and renewal is an outdoor group exhibition showcasing the work of 9 artists engaging with themes related to the life history and ecological research on a scavenging beetle present at the site
Beetles in the genus Nicrophorus, or burying beetles, search for a small carcass that they then bury in the soil in order to reproduce. A pair of burying beetles will work together to defend the rare, ephemeral, and high-nutrient carcass from microbial competitors and other interested organisms. They bury the carcass together and the female will lay eggs nearby. Once the carcass has been protected, buried, and preserved, both parents use the carrion to feed their larvae when they hatch.
In my research at the Bodega Marine Reserve, I use experimental chambers in the field to investigate the effects of temperature, competition, resource quality, microhabitat, and fog regime on burying beetle reproductive success. I have been calling these chambers nicrocosms, after Paul E. Hopwood et al.’s 2016 paper in Ecological Entomology. In this paper, nicrocosm is a play off of microcosm or mesocosm, an experimental set-up used in ecology to run controlled manipulations in small spaces that are still relevant to and part of the natural world. The root cosm, though, holds an even greater weight, meaning “world,” “order,” and “universe.” In this way, each nicrocosm in the field encapsulates an entire universe: an answer to an ecological question, the life’s work of an unseen beetle, birth and death, and the passing of time.
This exhibition will consist of works that serve as nicrocosms themselves, portals into the often overlooked and misunderstood world of scavengers. Burying beetles, in many ways, are the ultimate scavengers: they rely on and are adapted to a fleeting resource, and they play a crucial role in processing the dead so that those nutrients can be used again by the greater ecosystem. Whether using local and found materials, circular and sustainable processes, visual storytelling, or some combination, each artist provides a novel way to see and experience the living world we are within. - -Tracie Hayes
Nicrocosms: Studies on scavenging and renewal is an outdoor group exhibition showcasing the work of 9 artists engaging with themes related to the life history and ecological research on a scavenging beetle present at the site
Beetles in the genus Nicrophorus, or burying beetles, search for a small carcass that they then bury in the soil in order to reproduce. A pair of burying beetles will work together to defend the rare, ephemeral, and high-nutrient carcass from microbial competitors and other interested organisms. They bury the carcass together and the female will lay eggs nearby. Once the carcass has been protected, buried, and preserved, both parents use the carrion to feed their larvae when they hatch.
In my research at the Bodega Marine Reserve, I use experimental chambers in the field to investigate the effects of temperature, competition, resource quality, microhabitat, and fog regime on burying beetle reproductive success. I have been calling these chambers nicrocosms, after Paul E. Hopwood et al.’s 2016 paper in Ecological Entomology. In this paper, nicrocosm is a play off of microcosm or mesocosm, an experimental set-up used in ecology to run controlled manipulations in small spaces that are still relevant to and part of the natural world. The root cosm, though, holds an even greater weight, meaning “world,” “order,” and “universe.” In this way, each nicrocosm in the field encapsulates an entire universe: an answer to an ecological question, the life’s work of an unseen beetle, birth and death, and the passing of time.
This exhibition will consist of works that serve as nicrocosms themselves, portals into the often overlooked and misunderstood world of scavengers. Burying beetles, in many ways, are the ultimate scavengers: they rely on and are adapted to a fleeting resource, and they play a crucial role in processing the dead so that those nutrients can be used again by the greater ecosystem. Whether using local and found materials, circular and sustainable processes, visual storytelling, or some combination, each artist provides a novel way to see and experience the living world we are within. - -Tracie Hayes
photo credit: Elizabeth Herring
Carbon Copy
2023
Exhibition with Joshua G. Stein curated by Kitty Ross at AB Projects in Los Angeles
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Carbon Copy
If the landscape consists of the earth and the atmosphere, architecture exists between the two. Material particles—animal, vegetable, and mineral—move between these realms, blurring the boundaries of each. Hardened compounds like limestone were once living creatures. Hermit crabs collect minerals and objects from their surroundings to shield their bodies in a protective enclosure. Humans dig vast pits to harvest materials to erect buildings of the very materials upon which their architecture stands. The cavities are then filled with debris, either deliberately or via the ongoing movement of particles, and the pit becomes a mound. Birds swallow gastroliths as a mechanism for grinding food in their gizzards. Whales, seals and crocodiles are also known to swallow gastroliths, perhaps to serve as ballast. The soft body of an oyster transforms mineral irritants into pearls. Conversely, body ‘stones’ such as gallstones, bladder stones and kidney stones are painful formations of somatic minerals. The human body is geology and, accordingly, we humans are geologic agents.
This exhibition is a poetic examination of the transference, atomization and tracing of materials over time, and a means of questioning how we live, build, make, and evolve in the Anthropocentric landscape. - Kitty Ross
Chrysalis lepidoptera
Becoming connotes the recurrent act of deconstructing boundaries between bodies, constructing malleable new edges in which both identities exist simultaneously - a continual performance of immanence and difference...Becoming-feral constitutes a line of flight away from individuated and subjugated life forms, which are policed by the logistics of human exceptionalism, towards the messy mystical multiplicity of a world in common, a world of shared and multitudinal ecologies.
- Chessa Adsit-Morris, becoming Feral
now imagine
you’re a caterpillar
filmy eyes,
wet creased wings
slushy slop
you’re a caterpillar
filmy eyes,
wet creased wings
slushy slop
becoming—Feral is a creative research publication which aims to investigate the complex relationships between human/other-animals and the shifting categories of wild/feral/domestic, set within landscapes constantly being altered by global transformations of climate and capitalism. We are interested in exploring reciprocal and responsive multispecies reactions to the act of becoming-Feral.
The becoming—Feral Digital Collection acts as a companion collection to the print publication, presenting multimedia and extended entries of video art, audio/music, interviews, and photographic essays.
The becoming—Feral Digital Collection acts as a companion collection to the print publication, presenting multimedia and extended entries of video art, audio/music, interviews, and photographic essays.
Sound Scene Fest: Emerge
2021
Group Performance Festival created by DC Listening Lounge supported by DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, WPFW, Goethe Institut DC
Washington DC
June 24-26
2021
Group Performance Festival created by DC Listening Lounge supported by DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, WPFW, Goethe Institut DC
Washington DC
June 24-26
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de | composition
A decaying leaf offers the opportunity for continual iteration, composition, and interpretation. de | composition as an ongoing project that aims to tune a curious listener to the unfurling world of possibility in the earth’s multifaceted ability to communicate.
Interpretations:
Surface Tension
video installation
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music sheet printmedia
Group Show with: Yani Aviles, Ashley Gillanders, Rosemary Holliday Hall, SaraNoa Mark, Galen-Odell Smedley 
The evolution of natural forms and the evolution of human perception have coincided to produce the phenomenon of a potential recognition: what is and what we can see sometimes meet at a point of affirmation. This point, this affirmation, is two-faced: what has been seen is recognized and affirmed, and at the same time the seer is affirmed by what he sees.
-John Berger, 2016
Surface tension is a condition that is created by an entanglement of electrons. Electrons that are sensitive to the presence of magnetic fields. They entangle, enmesh, proliferate one another, combining and recombining to create different conditions to achieve different states. What state are you in while viewing this exhibit? What state are we in, collectively, in relation to history?
Rosemary Holliday Hall’s site specific installation ‘Adhesion’ is an assemblage of the artists interest in nature, forms, and patterns, and how humanity interacts with these elements (specifically in conditions of the crisis). Hailing from Los Angeles, Hall spent the initial months of 2020 relocating from Chicago to the West coast. Traversing the country at the beginning of summer, she spent weeks physically immersing herself, bodily processing ‘poesis’ with the earth. According to Heidegger, ‘poesis’ can be found in the blooming of a blossom, or the coming-out of a butterfly from its cocoon. This threshold, the moment ecstasis, is where Hall positions her inquiry. Reflecting on how experience and perception are conditioned by time and repetition, the artist melds the moment of the ‘event’ with a memory of it, while drawing up a conjuring or dream of the same. ‘Permeable Permutations’ captures autumn colored leaves with natural spore variations or bacterial discolorations, arranged as sheet music. What can be heard in a display of warning signs? Could this be read as a tune or is it nature's silent scream, a sort of self-cannibalism in protest of the climate crisis we’re currently experiencing? Hall arranges spotted yellowing leaves as sheet music for the viewer, who is also the player, inviting them to take part in the process of dying. Looking closely at nature during a global pandemic, a civil uprising and a US election year, Hall and her peers' works speak to a variety of concerns. To sit with the experience of non-locality (the basic connectivity of everything in nature), each of us become the determiner of what we choose to see (and be). The observer as the observed. The participant, as maker. The thinker, as doer.
- Pia Singh
Glass Curtain Gallery
2020
Third Coast Disrupted: Artists + Scientists on Climate
Group Exhibition
Chicago, IL
Sept 10-Oct30
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River of Shadows, Liquidation
video projection, porcelian casts of water retaining plants, spoons made from smashed pennies and steel, seeds
Third Coast Disrupted: Artists + Scientists on Climate is an exhibition of artworks culminating a yearlong conversation between artists and scientists centered on Climate Change impacts in the Chicago region and beyond.Hall’s multimedia installation explores economies and ecologies of water as a subject of tension. As temperatures rise the atmosphere can physically hold more water, which is made visible through extreme weather events, flooding, and drought throughout the planet.
In a dark room the viewer is enveloped in the folk song “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin Bad” sung by Ward H Ford. Projected on one wall is a spoon pouring water onto a larger-than-life penny, reaching capacity. The video suggests value systems based in economies of extraction have driven the road we are on to a bad place, a catastrophic tipping point. Accompanying the video is an installation of 108 ceramic casts of water retaining plants and seeds, which ask- how might we plant seeds for a living and more resilient future? Like ghosts of the present, the plants suggest the future of our planet lies in systems of value beyond monetary systems and towards those that value care and an understanding of the inter-being of all organisms.
Participating Artists: Jeremy Bolen, Barbara Cooper, Hector Duarte, Rosemary Holliday Hall, N. Masani Landfair, Meredith Leich, Andrew Yang
Participating Scientists: Elena Grossman, MPH; Daniel Horton, Ph.D.; Abigail Derby Lewis, Ph.D.; Aaron Packman, Ph.D.; Katherine Moore Powell, Ph.D; Desi Robertson-Thompson, Ph.D., Phil Willink, Ph.D
image credit: Columbia College
Encyclia imagosis
metal and oxidized fabric
The Codex Seraphinianus is an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world, created by Luigi Serafini, written in a self-invented alphabet. It contains hundreds of hybrids, imaginary and strange beings: a horse transforms into a cocoon, a bird’s nest sprouts legs with yellow sneakers, lovers become a crocodile. Each undergoes metamorphosis, creatively overcoming bodily limits. Many real creatures are stranger than imagined. The caterpillar, for example, encases itself in a chrysalis into which it releases enzymes that digest its own form, liquidating its’ tissues. Only structures called imaginal discs survive, able to reorder the larval soup into a new being. Through this process of imagination, caterpillars push themselves into a different future, the confines of their chrysalis paradoxically enabling their flight forward into the unfamiliar, just as the imagination does for other species.
Encyclia Imagosis consists of four human-scale oxidizing chrysalis sculptures. They mark an evolutionary world, where objects are process and forms are dynamic patterns creating symmetries, hybrids, mutations. Through an embodied exploration of the possibilities of reorienting both personal perception and cultural convention, Encyclia Imagosis investigates various ways we make sense of the world and relate to ourselves and others through imagination, metaphor, and material.
image credit: Aron Gent
The Blue Parrot
2020
Solo Exhibition + Artist Residency at The Blue Parrot
Chicago, IL
March 5 & 8
This project was made possible thanks to the support of Emilio Williams and Dr. Robert Murphy
2020
Solo Exhibition + Artist Residency at The Blue Parrot
Chicago, IL
March 5 & 8
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This project was made possible thanks to the support of Emilio Williams and Dr. Robert Murphy
Collabiosis
windshields, steel, projection, garage
locally sourced clay, steel spoons, brick
The solo exhibition, Collabiosis, culminated a multi-month artist residency at the Blue Parrot in Chicago, IL.
Collabiosis
/kəˈlabi ōsis|
A process or condition of collapsing together.
/kəˈlabi ōsis|
A process or condition of collapsing together.
Collabiosis is an invented word that comes from combining - collabi ( the etymological root of collapse and collaboration) and osis (a suffix denoting a process or condition of change). Utilizing a wide range of materials which include: locally sourced clay, windshields, projection, and steel spoons, the multi-roomed installation investigates transformation, perception, and time, highlighting the relationships between deconstruction and construction, chaos, and order.
image credit: Astro Escuadero
Public Presentation + Exhibition
In collaboration with Predrag Popovic
Phd in Geophysical Sciences
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL
May 10
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This project was made possible thanks to the support of The Art Science and Culture Initiative
Initiative at The University of Chicago and School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Stigmergy || The Space Inside Repetition
termites, sound, cabinet, book, cds, acrylic
The patterns of bird flocking, microbial growth, and insect colonies have captured the human imagination for centuries. These patterns demonstrate swarm intelligence, a process where an emergent order arises from seemingly random biological activity, and where apparently dissimilar systems can show very similar behaviour. Predrag Popovic (PhD candidate, Geophysical Sciences, UChicago) and Rosemary Hall ’s (MFA ‘19, Printmedia, SAIC) research focused on the oldest eusocial insect, the termite, and stigmergy (a key concept in the field of swarm intelligence).
The collaboration resulted in a multimedia installation, which included a sound filtering algorithm modeled after stigmergy and a library of books eaten by live termites. The termites ate a book from Life Nature Series, titled, The Universe.Cellulose pages and maps of the cosmos were submitted to termite editing. In time, the termites consumed and created their own architecture out of The Universe.
Through wondering in a termite’s wandering this collaboration searched for hybrid, inbetween, and experimental, translations that invite a broader spectrum of interpretation. Our flesh, our limbs, our movements are inscribed with a multispecies history. The pattern which connects may be best articulated through the poetry of interspecies relations, movements and behaviour.
Image Credit: Brittany Laurent
Sullivan Galleries
2020
MFA Thesis Exhibition
Chicago, IL
May 10
2020
MFA Thesis Exhibition
Chicago, IL
May 10
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A Predicament of Pressure
clay collected from construction sites in chicago, metal, engraved chicago common brick
Image Credit: Astro Escudero
Image Credit: Astro Escudero
Chicago, IL
Jan 27- March 11
This project was possible thanks to the support of:
Jonathan Solomon and David L. Hays.
Jan 27- March 11
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This project was possible thanks to the support of:
Jonathan Solomon and David L. Hays.
The Issue You Mentioned Earlier
On March 19th, 2015, Florida’s emergency management chief Bryan Koon testified before the State Senate Budget Subcommittee on the news that the Federal Emergency Management Agency would pull federal funding from states that refuse to directly address climate change.
In alignment with his position of climate change denial, Koon went through a series verbal gymnastics to avoid using the scientific term for our current catastrophic path in his statements.A scaled steel cofferdam displays phrases exchanged in official emails by climate change deniers in the US Senate. Such phrases are projected over a melted piece of ice, residue of the Polar Vortex that hit Chicago one week before the opening of the show. Thuribles for a poisonous mushroom colloquially known as Destroying Angel embody the abstract threat of climate change. The gallery’s circuit box frames a nilometer that measures the scales of an Ideal Flood and a two channel video installation loops the works “Catastrophic Ice Formation” and “Order is human.”
Video, fuse box, acrylic, metal, projection, mushrooms
Image Credit: Brittany Laurent and Alberto Ortega
Carbon Copy
2019
Group Exhibition with Carbon Copy Collective
Chicago, IL
March 5 & 8
2019
Group Exhibition with Carbon Copy Collective
Chicago, IL
March 5 & 8
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Noise of Dust
weather balloon, wood armature, white noise projection
Image Credit: Woojin Shin
Image Credit: Woojin Shin
UGLY
2020
Group Exhibition with Carbon Copy Collective
Chicago, IL
March 5 & 8
2020
Group Exhibition with Carbon Copy Collective
Chicago, IL
March 5 & 8
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The show's title is a mondegreen of "Diprosopus," the rare medical condition of two-headedness.
Die Prosperous
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clay interventions, brick dust, plastic bag, metal hooks, rocks
Image Credit: Astro Escuadero
Image Credit: Astro Escuadero
