Emptiness Ecologies

Emptiness Ecologies

Yes We Cannibal's newest exhibition challenges contemporary discourse around the ecology and humanity's interactions with our environment

Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

When I first walked into the Yes We Cannibal gallery on the Friday morning before the December 17 opening of their newest exhibition, Emptiness Ecologies—the first thing I noticed was the video footage playing to my right, showing a taxidermied cat pelt being arranged to pose beside flowers and crystals, a dried iguana perched on its mangled ear.

The film—created by experimental artists Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby—is titled “Civil Twilight at the Vernal Equinox” and explores the relationships between humans and other species here on Earth, probing at the idea of “cuteness” and whether or not human empathy is purely exploitative. Such challenging lines of thought characterize Emptiness Ecologies, which Yes We Cannibal founders Mat Keel and Liz Lessner have dubbed the “most conceptually ambitious” of the gallery’s endeavors yet. The show carries on the conversations sparked by the Summer 2021 show Eat the Anthropocene with Cesar and Lois and friend entities—which explored humanity’s interconnectedness with its ecosystem as an avenue for new knowledge pathways. This show, explained Keel, was curated to serve as a “creative audit” on recent conversations on ecology, particularly in dialogue with the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness; and it features work in multiple media by mid-to-late career artists and writers working in the environmental arena of philosophy and art.

Across from Duke and Battersby’s film, a single 8.5x11 piece of artwork enjoyed, for now, all of my attention; by the end of that day when the installation was completed, it would be joined by thirty or so other “data sculptures” in a grid displaying as many feathered, broad-stroked conglomerates that are 3D-generated visualizations of birdsong. Specifically, birdsong that no longer exists, from species now extinct. Of the work, created by architect and media artist Clarissa Ribeiro, Keel said, “When you start looking at them, as you see, the birds are kind of distorted within the form, which is generated by sound. So, there’s kind of a mixing up of the senses, which ties back into this stuff about emptiness, and how we think about sense, as well as extinction.”

Equally mesmerizing and multi-layered are collages by Houma nation artist and activist Monique Verdin, two Maki-e works from Chihiro Ito’s “Painting Vegetables and Flowers” project, Anna Scime’s film—created from old media technologies— which equates color distortions to gene manipulation and survival, and a set of sculptural installations by New Orleans multi-media artist Dawn DeDeaux. Accompanying all of the visual art are a series of original essays by writers and thinkers including communitarian activist and philosopher Dr. John Clark, LSU Museum of Art’s Curator and Director of Public Programs Courtney Taylor, and author Laura Morris.

Emptiness Ecologies is on view at Yes We Cannibal until February 4. Find a full listing of Yes We Cannibal’s upcoming programming associated with Emptiness Ecologies on page 13, as well as on the organization’s website at yeswecannibal.org.