Tracing Ways
Collaborative exhibition with E. Saffronia Downing at Comfort Station
December 7- January 5, 2025
Opening Recember December 7th 4-7 pm
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In the Realm of Spiders
Exhibition review by Jane Handel in The Vortex
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In the Realm of Spiders
Group Exhibition curated by Cassandra C. Jones at the Ojai Valley Museum
Opening Reception November 1st
October 24- December 8th
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Taft Art in Nature Artist Residency and Exhibition
My residency at Taft Gardens was extended for another 9-months to continue exploring insects in the gardens.
Group Exhibition Opening: June 1, 2024 11:00 AM 8:00 PM
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Nicrocosms: Studies on Scavenging and Renewal
Group Exhibition at UC Davis Bodega Bay Marine Laboratory
RSVP here
Friday, June 16th, from 3pm to 7pm
Saturday, June 17th, from 10am to 2pm
Artists include: Michele Burr, E. Saffronia Downing, Emily Gordon, Emily Goyins, Rosemary Holliday Hall, Ryan Hodge, Kelley O’Leary, Ofelia Viloche Pulido, Alejandra Ruiz Suárez
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
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Wandering as Making
July Studio Session with AB Projects
I will be facilitating a studio session with AB Projects in July! Studio Sessions are an online platform where artists working in clay gather under the guidance of a lead artist to create material experiments centered around particular topics. It’s like having new studio mates with similar interests and concerns for a month: get together, get hands in clay, get messy hands around tea mugs as you collectively brainstorm about what-ifs and can-you-believes.
About the Wandering as Making session:
“The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it… Walking can also be imagined as a visual activity, every walk or tour leisurely enough both to see and to think over the sights, to assimilate the new into the known.”
– Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
In this Studio Session we will explore how the act of wandering creates rhythms, repetitions, and relations that form research pathways. The word ‘research’ comes from Old French ‘recercher’, "to seek out, search closely," and from Latin circare "to go about, wander, traverse, to wander hither and thither, to circle.” Through wandering, a multitude of relations and stories on this earthly clay crust emerge. We will consider meandering as making and question how we observe, collect, trace, and relate to the bodies and landscapes we inhabit. We will invite chance and follow with care as we, according to Pauline Oliveros, “walk like your feet are ears.”
Register here
This session is scheduled for Sundays, July 9, 16, 23, 30 from 4-6pm PST (that’s Los Angeles time).
Registration is $250 and includes all four sessions.
Participants gather via Zoom.
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State of Ceramics - online discussion
Field Guide to Destabilizing Objects
online registration - https://www.a-bprojects.com/state-of-ceramics
State of Ceramics is an ongoing series of discussions centered around evaluating the present and future of the ceramics field. Participants are encouraged to share their unique perspectives and voices during these open and inclusive dialogues. This is an opportunity for us to take responsibility for how our field is shaped.
In this collective conversation we will generate a Field Guide to Destabilizing Objects. Although a field guide is usually written from a point of encyclopedic authority, we aim to develop an alternative format in which we ask questions, suggest methodologies, and stake out positions from which we can embrace roles of uncertainty so as to best learn from the materials that surround and support us.
Many practitioners focus upon the completion of an object (and often its end point as a marketable object) but the materials and parts of the land with which we choose to work are not finite; they are part of larger systems and histories, and therefore the objects we make have the capacity to tell larger stories. By following and observing the trajectory of materials, we investigate whether the unstable and uncertain process of engaging with ceramics (in an unstable and uncertain world) can be transcribed into open-ended objects and, in turn, expand the approach of the broader ceramics field.
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Artist Researcher in Residence at Taft Gardens 2023
Ojai, CA
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Carbon Copy Exhibition at AB Projects, 2023
Two-person exhibition with Joshua G. Stein ( Radical Craft) curated by Kitty Ross at AB Projects.
January 14- May 20
1206 Maple Ave., #540, Los Angeles CA
Open Hours: Wednesdays 2-5 pm or by appointment
Months of conversations between artists Rosemary Holliday Hall, Joshua G. Stein (Radical Craft), and guest curator Kitty Ross revolved around notions of material in geologic, biologic, architectural, atmospheric, and ceramic iterations.
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.
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Elizabeth Herring and I opened Spore Space new art project space in Ojai, CA.
221 E Matilija Street Ojai, CA
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DREAM IN DEIXIS Review by John David O’Brian Artillary Mag
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PERCHANCE TO DREAM: CHANGE IN DEIXIS- Review by Peter Frank Tzvetnik
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DREAMS IN DEIXIS @ Tufenkian Fine Arts Gallery July 15- August 20
Tufenkian Fine Arts is pleased to announce, Dreams in Deixis, a group exhibition curated by Ava Burnes featuring artworks by Claire Chambless, Sessa Englund, Lara Joy Evans, Rosemary Holliday Hall, Isabella Kressin, Amelia Lockwood, Carlotta Lücke, and Kira Scerbin. The exhibition will be on view from July 15th through August 20th, 2022, with an opening reception to be held on Friday, July 15th from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm.
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Order becoming-Feral book online at: becoming.ink
Digital collection: becoming.ink/feral-digital-collection/
“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.
In addition to a print edition, we will be launching a digital companion collection to present multimedia contributions in the form of audio works, video art and photographic essays.”
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New online exhibition Making Kin—Worlds Becoming. I’m thrilled to be part of this exhibit that brings together a thoughtful community of artists to explore our deep interconnections with the living world. Curated by Andrew S. Yang, the exhibit offers promiscuous possibilities for new intimacies and emerging relations with the human and more-than-human world—as well as the wonders, understandings, and complications those acts entail.
www.makingkin.net
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PERFORMANCE - June 2021
((( de ︎ composition )))
interpretations performed by Luke Stewart, Nik Francis, Sarah Marie Hughes, Corey Thuro, and Nate Scheible
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Artist in Residence at Vashon Island Artist Residency May-June 2021
( image: Todd Pearson)
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Review of Viral Ecologies on New City
An Experiment in Emergence: Viral Ecologies Looks Beyond the Pandemic , by Cecilia Resende Santos in New City
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VIRAL ECOLOGIES II
We’re ( Saffronia and i ) thrilled to release our second issue of Viral Ecologies– a digital platform created to explore the diverse systems and ecologies of our time. Through this platform, 8 new artists, writers, and researchers undertake a multipronged investigation of emergence. They explore how small parts of large systems give rise to patterns, ecosystems, and mutations.
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SURFACE TENSION group exhibition curated by Pia Singh @ Heaven Gallery
Chicago, IL
December 11 - January 24, 2021
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THIRD COAST DISRUPTED: Artists and Scientists on Climate
Group Exhibition @ Glass Curtain Gallery
Chicago, IL
September 8- February 19, 2021 ( extended)
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VIRAL ECOLOGIES ~ ONLINE PUBLICATION in collaboration with Saffronia E. Downing
VIRALECOLOGIES.US
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https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/05/rosemary-holliday-hall-chrysalises/
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Long-Term Artist Residency @ Global Forest, Germany
POSTPONED
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Artist Residency & SOLO Exhibition @ The Blue Parrot
Chicago, IL
March 5 & 8
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SOLO Exhibition @ Paris London Hong Kong
Chicago, IL
January 10- February 22
http://parislondonhongkong.com/rosemary-holliday-hall/
(Works still on view in gallery office)
