Unfurling Expanded Environments
Unfurling Expanded Environments
Curated by moira williams and Jeremiah Barber with Humanities Advisor: Naomi Ortiz and Indigenous Knowledge Keeper: Cata Gomes, of Ramaytush descent and founder of The Muchia Te’ Indigenous Land Trust
Crip’d Ecologies:
Unfurling Expanded Environments
Feb 1–March 10, 2024
In our current moment with no shortage of grief and resistance, Crip’d Ecologies centers disabled artists across race, gender, class and disability, who are expanding ideas of environmentalism toward a more complex reflection of our feelings of trauma, fear, anger and desire. Crip strategies are dynamic, interdependent, and brilliant. These strategies are expressed throughout the exhibition and Convening, offering new perspectives on landscapes that are personal, shared, participatory, hacked, and imagined. Each of these relational ways of being and thinking include our body-mind-spirits. The works here break away from colonial ableisms of the land
and our bodies. They challenge where the idea of “invasive” species comes from, and find joy and ancestral connections by treating the entirety of our surroundings as part of our nature. Multispecies relationships abound, and are echoed in Crip queer and tactile ecologies, imprinting on leaves, bodies filled with flowering branches, memory, sacredness, sorrow, and abundantly colorful depictions of plants, animals and the atmosphere and planets. The environment, increasingly synonymous with “the built world”, is playfully and spaciously reimagined and challenged throughout the exhibition to unfurl Crip’d ecological intimacies.
- moira williams and Jeremiah Barber
This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit www.calhum.org.
Image Description: A wide view of the front gallery with white walls and wooden floor. A sculpture occupies the floor and series of 2D works are spread across the wall, and a variety of seating is arranged throughout the room. The sculpture is by Jaklin Romine and has a photoprint on silky pink fabric draped over rolls of colorful blue and aqua colored foam. The prints on the wall are by Naomi Ortiz and are full of saturated colors, cacti, flowers and a crow. Next to Naomi's art is a plywood shelf with colorful RISO prints and tactile artworks.
Pictured left: Installation view
Image Description: A wide view of the front gallery facing the other direction. Two white wall sections each have paintings on them and they are divided by a column that's been painted a bright candy pink. The color continues onto a pedestal that juts out from the wall and is also pink. On top of the pedestal are two playful animal sculptures by Peter Cordova. To the left is an ecstatically bright and colorful square painting by Ines Villalobos, with a darker top, a sky-blue middle and a dotted red, orange and yellow lower section. On the right wall are blue orbs painted on square white paper by Leeza Doreian.
Pictured left: Installation view
Exhibiting Artists
Indira Allegra
Beast Nest
Megan Bent
Elana Cooper
Peter Cordova
Vanessa Hernández Cruz
Alexa Dexa
Leeza Doreian
M Eifler
Stephanie Heit
Petra Kuppers
Anuj Larvaidya
Cynthia Lee
Darrin Martin
Naomi Ortiz
Tricia Rainwater**
Resting Museum
Jaklin Romine
Octavia Rose Hingle
A. Sef
Maia Scott
Ruth Tabancay
Aura Valdes
Ines Villalobos
* Current Root Division Studio Artist
** Root Division Studio Alum
Indira Allegra
Indira Allegra is an artist whose work in sculpture, fiber, and video explores an expanded idea of weaving as a ritual, one that can carry many convergent stories. Deeply important for Indira, are desires for transformation which haunt sites and beings experiencing them. In their work for Crip'd Ecologies, the video Crossover (pictured here) was projected as a triptych between the weavings Upon Notice of Your Death I&II. The video features performer Sheena Johnson partially submerged in water and moving without sound. In a lake that extends to the horizon, they dance and weave enchantments in the water. Their twin images are at times mirrored or flipped, and in the final moments they move into the center void of the space between them.
Indira interlaces Black relationships with water, where ancestral spirits simultaneously connect the living with the dead. Dramatically elegant, the movements of Johnson seem to call towards the afterlife, with a resonance to ancestral trauma of chattel slavery and continued racism towards Black people that intentionally severs cultural knowledge and
relationships; but also as a resistance that liberates, nourishes, and sanctifies. Here, their weavings along with the moving image transmute into a greater whole, one that brings intimacy with loss and crosses over into unknown places.
Image Description: In the center of a watery landscape, a Black performer in a white dress seems to walk forward towards another, but they are both slightly translucent, and it quickly becomes clear they are a mirror image, crossing into each other. The performer is submerged up to their waist in the water, dragging one hand behind and looking straight forward, with a bright ray of sunlight illuminating them from behind. They have short dark hair and their dress is elegant, pleated and sleeveless. The water is dark and choppy, blue and scattered with much darker shadows.
Two channel video projection
5 minutes 38 seconds
Pictured: Crossover, 2013
Megan Bent
Megan Bent is a lens based artist interested in the ways image making can happen beyond using a traditional camera that includes chlorophyll photography. She is drawn to processes that embrace and reflect her disabled experience; especially interdependence, impermanence, care, and slowness. Megan’s Quarantine Day 980 is a three object installation: a cloth veiled chlorophyll printed prayer plant leaf, a photograph of the chlorophyll printed leaf and a tactile print of the photograph. The chlorophyll leaf, if exposed to daylight, would fade, and since the leaf will ultimately fade, Megan’s work ties into the idea of a biological memory cycle. Megan takes a photograph of the leaf-print as soon as it’s made, so in two prints time is seen passing. The tactile version, developed with VT Association for the Blind, has highcontrast, embossed elements. Megan ties disability together with the environment through memory, cycles of decay, vulnerability, uncertainty and practices of care.
Image Description: An installation view shows a pedestal with a black frame on top covered in a white fabric, and beyond it on the wall a photograph of a leaf with a black background, next to a smaller black and white tactile print that represents the same photograph. These images will be described together here. You can see details of each on the following spread, which includes a close up of the two works on the wall, and a close up of the work on the pedestal with the cloth pulled back.
Works On The Wall: A vertical tear drop shaped prayer plant leaf rests on a black background. The leaf is light green with dark green cross hatched lines. The lines create a checkered pattern. Printed on the leaf is a shadow of Megan’s hand and extended arm making the “I Love You” sign in American Sign Language. Surrounding her arm is the shadow of window panes in a grid. In the tactile print next to it, the colors are reversed, and the leaf is black on a white background. The hand signing "I Love You" is cut out of the middle of the leaf, and the window pane shapes are more abstract and blocky.
Pictured:
Quarantine Day 980, (I Love You, Goodnight), Triptych, 2023
Triptych includes: a chlorophyll print of a checkered prayer plant leaf; an archival pigment print (Edition of 8 + 2 AP); a tactile representation print Dimensions vary
Work On The Pedestal: A black frame laying flat on a pedestal is covered in a white cloth, but here it has been pulled back to reveal the inside. The same leaf appears again, this time it's the actual leaf suspended in a square wooden box, and you can see the same sign and window shapes. The difference to the digital print is that in the real leaf, the bright green color has faded some. The leaf appears more yellow and a bit brown at the edges, curling inwards.
Elana Cooper
Elana Cooper is known for her striking, large scale floral silhouettes. She is inspired by photographs of flowers in plant journals and guides. Here, she paints single plants in bold black strokes on white backgrounds to create a strong contrast. Elana’s technique gives her representational paintings a haunting quality. Her flower silhouettes are a presence and an absence, a memory, a longing, and speculative biological future all at the same time. Elana’s daily painting practice shows a deep intimacy with floral life and is a reminder of our interdependence with the plant world.
Pictured left to right, top to bottom:
Untitled l, 2023
Acrylic on paper
23 x 15 in.
Untitled lII, 2023
Acrylic on paper
23 x 15 in.
Untitled lI, 2023
Acrylic on paper
23 x 15 in.
Untitled lV, 2023
Acrylic on paper
23 x 15 in.
Image Description: Elana's black and white silhouettes paintings are shown in a grid on the gallery wall. The white gallery wall has been painted with a giant yellow spot, which is shiny and reflective like a sun glowing behind her paintings. Elana's paintings are each described here, and detail images are on the next page.
Untitled I: A flower stem curves up towards the upper left corner of the paper. The main leaf on the plant is broad and oval with a deep cut V shape where it meets the stem. Two more leaves branch out from the stem and sprout four tightly curled round shapes facing upward.
Untitled II: A flower stem grows upward to support a symmetrical bloom. The bloom has lots of zigzaggy edges and a pointy end that folds open. Folded away from the bloom are two broad leaves, which are crossed by two thinner leaves, which shoot out from the stem at a 90 degree angle.
Untitled III: A flower’s long stem grows upwards from the bottom edge of the paper. Two rumply long leaves twist and unfurl on the stem and under a blooming flower. The flower has four petals. Its top and bottom petals are wide and rounded. Two long and thin side petals stretch outward.
Untitled IV: A flower stem curls in a wide arc. The stem supports three heavy flower buds right in a row. They droop downwards and have jagged ends. At the bottom of the stem two leaves open outwards. Higher up on the stem two younger leaves are just poking out.
Pictured left to right:
Untitled I, Untitled II, Untitled IV. Image Descriptions on previous page
Peter Cordova
Peter Cordova is an artist whose work revolves around his love of animals, real and from his imagination. He draws animals in multiples on paper or hand builds them with clay. Then Peter finishes his animal sculptures with earth tones. Peter highlights clay’s flexibility and presence in our daily lives and environment. His smaller ceramic works are intimate and invite us to connect to the earth and to the animals we are living with throughout the world or in our imagination.
Image Description: A low photograph of two of Peter's sculptures on top of a pink painted pedestal. On the left is a ceramic sculpture of a black and white striped skunk lying down with its legs stretched out in front and behind its body. It seems sleepy because its chin is on the ground and its eyes are closed. But its pointy ears and upright tail seem to be alert. The skunk rests on a big round base covered in yellow with white polka dots. The dots are not painted but pressed into the clay.
On the right is a long animal slightly leaning left and seated. It is looking forward and a little upward with open eyes. The animal’s yellow and wide eyes are outlined with thin carved lines. Between its eyes is a light pink, slightly opened and rounded beak. Two dark holes are below the beak. The animal has pointy ears on the side of its head. Between its ears at the top of its head are splotchy patches of light black. Its body has thin carved stripes that look black and a light pink all over glaze.
6
11 x 8 x 7 in.
Pictured left to right: Skunk, 2012
Glazed ceramic sculpture
x 10 x 9.5 in.
Untitled, 2015
Glazed ceramic sculpture
Indigo Rising (series), 2023
Gouache on paper
20 x 19 in. each
From left to right:
First Quarter: Revolutions
Waxing Gibbous: Points on the Terminator
Late Waxing Gibbous: The Sixth Refolding
Full Moon: Mensis, Masah, and Mona
Waning Gibbous: Tides Turning
Late Waning Gibbous: Dryer than bone
Third Quarter: Theia’s Kiss
Indigo Rising
Leeza Doreian
An artist with a background in textile design, Leeza Doreian is inspired by clothing and discarded fabrics that recall land and sky based ecologies. Indigo Rising is a sequential set of 13 paintings. On view here are paintings 4 through 10. For Indigo Rising, a bundled and folded blue collared shirt with an allover white dot pattern serves as still life material. In these realistic gouache paintings, the folds of fabric and light source reveal waxing, waning and full moon shapes. Leeza’s work invites us into her relationships with the moon, sensory experience of working with fabric, and time. She is interested in making paintings that communicate “on multiple levels simultaneously and poetically.” Leeza’s paintings raise questions about the consumption and romanticization of landscape imagery and what is nature or natural, where it is located and for whom.
Image Description: A series of seven medium sized and very detailed paintings on bright white paper. All of the paintings are in the center of the paper. Each painting is of a blue, long sleeve shirt with white moon shapes. The shirt is bundled and folded into a sometimes rumply ball shape. The bundles range in tints: from a completely dark blue with gray dots, to partially dark blue and gray dots, to a sliver of dark blue and gray dots, to bright blue and white dots. Along with the moving light source or the varying shading effect, each folded bundle grows smaller and looks farther away. This effect causes the painted bundles to move away or come closer like the moon does during its multiple phases.
On the next page are two detail images. On the left is an angled view of the first two pieces and half of the third in the series. The camera captures them at an angle to the wall so that the one closest is in focus and the ones farther away are in soft focus, and the clean white square frames cast shadows on the wall.
On the right is a detail of the last painting on view cropped closely to show the extreme level of detail in the painting.
MEifler
M’s work embraces crip tech through hacks that move between paper and a smartphone camera, mixing analog and digital drawing together. For M, this is a spatial and layered way of seeing, knowing, and interacting with their environment. Bright squiggly drawings are cut out and pinned to both built and natural surroundings, to journals, signage, and plants. Sometimes M photographs the drawings and adds another layer of digital drawings on top of their original drawings. M's work is a relational connection to ecologies at the edges of the land that are not always physically or mentally accessible, but always intimate. This series of digital photographs and drawings are shared from the view of their family RV.
Image Description: At left is an installation view of M's work. A table and stool sit at an angle in the corner, behind which is a series of colorful pieces of paper with handwritten instructions and a large white scroll of paper covered in a grid of photographs taken with a smartphone. There is a blue string connecting the
Pictured: Augmented Ink, 2022 Digital painting, ink, paper, photo Dimensions vary
scroll to other parts of the installation and little paper drawings clothespinned to the string. Each image in the grid is the same size. In the middle of each image is a drawing with lots of squiggles and shapes that seem like they are animated and moving. The drawings are colored in neon reds, blues, greens, yellows and pinks. Each bright colored drawing appears in different physical spaces. Like on an artists’ journal, on an iPad, cut out and pinned to a bush, cut out and propped between rocks in front of a lake. Fragments of a personal story are in the margins of the drawings like a wardrobe of clothes, a cuddly dog, medical devices, books, and artmaking supplies.
On the right is a detail of one of the photos in the grid. In the center are layers of bright squiggly drawings outlined in neon colors like orange, green, and pink. They seem to be bursting from a bundle of colored pencils, which are held together with a rubber band, propped up on a table surface. A pile of other squiggle drawings is just behind the bundle on the table, and another drawing of crystal forms is being held by a light skinned hand in the foreground. Just past the table surface and behind all the overlapping drawings is a frosty, yellow tinted window. Outside the window are some tall evergreen trees poking into the horizon.
Anuj Larvaidya
Anuj is an artist who works between performance art and film around ecologies, gender, sexuality and queerness. Anuj’s audio trailer and movie poster are promotional materials for a speculative cinema project about queer desire and crip’d ecologies in the after life of HIV. Drawing on the history of the use of macaque monkeys for antiviral drug testing, Anuj brings attention to the intimacy of care and carelessness of simian sacrifice, the virus, and queer survival. Anuj writes that “this work invites audiences to bear witness to the un-becoming of non-human others who labor for our loves.”
Image Description: On the left is an installation view of Anuj's large print movie poster framed in a dark wood frame with two sets of headphones connected. Their wires come out from behind the picture and they
are hanging on the wall. In the poster, photographed from the torso up, a bearded person rests against a puzzle tree. Their eyes are closed revealing gold, blue, and a tangle of glittering tails emerges from their third eye. They are wearing a harness made of kombucha leather. In their left ear, a proteus blooms. From their hands emerges an oval shaped collage of monkey kin. The monkey faces are incomplete, and they are growing out of a tree like structure. On its top right, bulging out of the oval, is the heart of an oak tree. The oak tree heart center is puckered. On the left, superimposed on the image are pieces of bark and lichen that extrude the puzzle tree into real life, as if the tree was growing over the person. On the top right is the title of the poster. It is made of kombucha leather and says: Love, Simeon. Below the title a gnarly half circle of a kombucha mother holds the text: a motion picture performance. Above the title are a handful of straw flowers and a couple of filigreed skeletal leaves.
Pictured:
Love Simeon, A Motion-Picture Performance, 2024
Promotional poster (printed image with kombucha leather, dried flowers, found bark and lichen) and audio trailer
37 x 28 in l 5:00 min
Two detail images on the right show closer views of the poster. They are at an angle so you can see that the flowers, bark and kombucha leather stick out from the photograph, giving it rich organic textures.
Naomi Ortiz
Naomi Ortiz is a poet, writer, and visual artist. Their intersectional work focuses on self care for activists, disability justice, climate action, and relationship with place. In addition to participating as an artist, Naomi was the Humanities Advisor for Crip'd Ecologies. Throughout their work Naomi explores "cultivating care and connection within states of stress while emphasizing interdependence and spiritual growth." Several of Naomi’s paintings function as a cosmology, with objects and symbols planted among the branches or roots of cacti, each charged with meanings that are individual, cultural, and Disability justice oriented. In their art and writing, Naomi investigates how climate change impacts connection to place, expands on and complicates who is seen as an environmentalist, and reimagines relationships with the land. As a Disabled Mestizx living in the Arizona U.S./Mexico borderlands, they are passionate about organizing with the Southern Arizona Community Care Collective/Colectivo de Beinestar Comunitario.
Image Description: Resistance is Fertile is painted as part of the root system of an ocotillo along with multiple pictures of disability community, culture, and protest. The top painting is a Crip arm with the words, “Is It Accessible?” While a finger pushes a seed into the soil. The view is above and below ground. Multiple desert plants such as a palo verde, cholla, nopal, saguaro, creosote are dead having grown from seeds whose roots have died. One desert plant, an ocotillo, is flush green and has flowers connected to the root system of community and protest. A more detailed Image Description of the collage of pictures – a sign that says, “we’re here, we’re disabled, get used to it!” A photo showing a wheelchair user being arrested by cops. A quilt of different disabled people made by Corbett O’Toole which says, “disabled people prove resistance works.” Multiple chair users holding signs and blocking a Greyhound bus advocating for access. A close-up picture of hands handcuffed to wheelchair
rim. Disabled people crawling dragging canes, wheelchairs behind them up the Capital steps taken by Tom Olin. A photo from the disability pride Parade of people carrying signs, one sign says, “I’ve got pride on my side.” From the Coalición nacional para latinxs con discapacidades conference 2017, a sign that reads, “we demand detained, immigrants receive: Adequate food, Clean water, Basic healthcare, Mental health care, Due process, Freedom from restraint and seclusion, ADA and 504 compliance, Respect, Dignity, Humane treatment. A photo of Stacey Milbern and the artist, Naomi Ortiz, with signs hanging from the back of their wheelchairs that say, Open your movement to disability culture and Disability is cultural not medical. Lastly a photo of an ADAPT rally where disabled people are trying to enter a building blocked by numerous police.
Pictured:
Resistance is Fertile, 2017
Digital pigment print
24 x 36 in.
Pictured left to right:
Resistance is Fertile, 2017
Digital pigment print
24 x 36 in.
Mending, 2021
Digital pigment print
50 x 24 in.
Image Description: At the left is an installation view of both of Naomi's print works in the exhibition. Resistance is on the left and is described on the previous page. On the right is Mending, which shows a painting of maguey (a large agave plant that grows 3 to 6 feet tall) with a tall flower stalk. On each stalk arm there are different objects, a raven looks out into the land, lit candles with a ribbon of Milagros, a heart with cholla flowers under dripping water, a woven rug with the 4 colors/directions meeting in the center, a bird nest, the waxing, waning and full moon and maguey flowers. Three monarch butterflies are flying nearby. In the background is sand and distant mountains.
To the right is a detail image of Naomi's second book, which was recently released and was available in the gallery, "Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice" (Punctum Books, 2023).
Tricia Rainwater
Tricia Rainwater is a mixed Choctaw Indigiqueer artist who works in photography, video and multimedia. Drawing on historical documents and self-portraiture, her work channels trauma, healing, and photography as a form of remembering. In Chahta hymn, the artist sits in front of the camera, repeating in Choctaw the phrases “Sipokni, hlokoffi yvt chim vlphesa” (“Grandmother you deserve healing”) and “Hlakoffi yvt chim vlphesa” (“I deserve healing”). Together, these phrases serve as an inter-generational incantation to transmute her and her pokni’s pain and grief from colonization and familial abuse. As Rainwater is not a heritage speaker, her struggle to articulate the words in their shared ancestral language indicates the longstanding emotional and psychological effects from inherited trauma. Sage bundles arranged in the shape of a medicine wheel representing the cardinal directions inspire new ways of liberating the trauma of past and present generations.
Image Description: A video projection on a white wall is interrupted by the shape of a medicine wheel or cross shape of sage bundles pointing outwards, upwards and down. In the video, a fat light brown woman wearing a black shirt and blue denim jeans is pictured from the waist up, sitting in front of a clean white wall. She stares into camera with her hair cascading down one shoulder and a large hoop earring in her other ear. The subtitles below her read “Sipokni, hlokoffi yvt chim vlphesa” (“Grandmother you deserve healing”).
Pictured: Chahta hymn, 2024
Video projected over sage bundles 6 minutes 34 seconds
Resting Museum
Resting Museum is a disability collective conceived by Priyanka D'Souza and Shreyasi Pathak. Their Disabled Dictionary is a series of 33 pieces in total that refer to the human vertebrae, 8 of which are on view here. Each piece in Disabled Dictionary shows a word that sounds similar sounding to the word “reedh”, or spine, in Hindi. The origin languages used are Hindi, Sanskrit, English, Arabic, and Persian. Disabled Dictionary is presented as a kind of learning tool, with an International Phonetic Alphabet pronunciation below the multiple translations, a poetic definition, and an object mounted to the side. Priyanka’s playful use of language and misdirection, and unpredictable choice of objects, embody and communicate relationships between disability, language, time and non-human life.
Image Description: At left is an installation view of 8 frames with layered paper objects on the left, each resembling tree bark or a seashell. A Dictionary-like black text sits on the right of each with similar sounding words in Hindi, Sanskrit, English, Arabic, and Persian, their International Phonetic Alphabet pronunciation and meanings. Each appears on a beige colored paper with a natural wood frame..
On the right is a detail image. It shows a small bundle of heavily worn black paper with brown fibers sticking out on all sides. On top of the black paper are miniature paintings of reddish flowers blossoming from green leaves. On the right side of the picture are a series of texts in different languages and phonetic spellings, displayed like a dictionary definition. The image and writing appear on a beautiful speckled natural color paper.
Pictured:
Disabled Dictionary: South Asia Edition 'र' (Speech therapist approved), 2022
Gouache, paper pulp, coffee, Frieze magazine paper, newspaper, wood, shell, and digital print on Sanganeri paper Dimensions vary
Jaklin Romine
Jaklin Romine is a lens based artist working with large scale images that are printed into chiffon and iridescent spandex with sublimation printing. The process makes her photographs a pliable object that can drape, lay on, and sag over the sculptures she makes. The soft sculpture here combines "the beauty and mastery of my deceased grandmother’s sewing art and my photographic practice." This body of work combines Jaklin’s older project, Why Give Me Flowers When I'm Dead?… The flowers that the artist gave to her abuela when she was alive are put back into a body to celebrate her. The flowers spill out of every collar, sleeve, and pant leg, adorning a body that is no longer alive, to give it a revitalized expression, challenging the perception of reality through an on-site installation. Jaklin’s abuela possessed a keen fashion sense, which helped her navigate space as a Mexican women in East Los Angeles. Jaklin says, "I took the power back and connected our creative practice to celebrate her love and life. Amore Eterno".
Image Description: A floor sculpture made with blue three pieces of wide 2 inch foam, on top of a plywood platform, with colorful pink silky photographs draped on top. On this page is a wide angled view of the sculpture, and on the next page is a view from above and a detail from the side. The foam pieces are rolled and wrapped together making a long interconnected and rolling and wavy form. Under the first rolled foam piece is a mirrored chrome metal cylinder. Under the second, a large black pot is curled inside with three bright orange clamps tightly holding part the foam to the metal. The last piece of foam is tightly rolled together and also clamped. Resting on top of the foam wave are three pieces of fabric layered on top of one another with a photograph printed on them. The top layer or photograph is partially transparent. In it you can see a white suit stuffed with bright flower arrangements coming out of a red shirt with white polka dots. The flowers are coming out of the neck, sleeves and pants legs of the suit. The two underlayers of fabric are more velvety and show close up images of the flower arrangments. Since the fabrics are pink and partially transparent, and the foam is different shades of blue and green, the whole sculpture vibrates with different colors from different angles of view.
She Breathes in Dirt and Exhales Flowers/Mejor Sola Que Mal
Acompañada, 2021-2022
Digital photographs sublimated onto chiffon and iridescent spandex, foam, sheet metal, metal column
49 x 90 x 28 in.
Pictured:
Octavia Rose Hingle
Memory Garden (for Derek Jarman) is inspired by and in memory of the gardening practices and memoirs kept by the queer French experimental filmmaker and AIDS activist Derek Jarman. After Jarman received a positive HIV diagnosis in the mid 80’s, he bought Prospect Cottage, a Victorian fisherman's hut on the desert sands of Dungeness, England, where he began to assemble gardens from local plants and found objects. He called his process of gardening “therapy and pharmacopeia.” Rose Hingle’s garden is meant to shift and grow throughout the exhibition and provides a platform for a performance with sound artist Maria BC during the show’s closing Convening. The garden combines found objects, eco regional plants, and plants that are often called "invasive" species. This combination, along with Rose Hingle’s and Maria BC’s performance, explores reconstructed landscapes and our relationships to them, including how we can nurture and respect all beings and bodies.
Image Description: Two views (at left a wide angle perspective, and on the right a detail, closer and at an angle) of an installation of tree branches, green growing things, and rusty metal armature contained inside a corrugated metal garden. The tub is shaped like a pill and the outside is covered in chicken wire that is interwoven with an irregular pattern of dried moss. The branches are dark red, like the rusty metal, as they are from a madrone tree. Beneath the branches low-light loving plants are arranged in the soil between spiraling designs made from white river stones and eucalyptus pods. Above the garden, a single LED grow light is woven into a second rusted metal object, this one has random geometric sides and bits of moss woven in too.
Pictured: Memory Garden (for Derek Jarman), 2023 Corrugated metal, metal container, soil, eco regional & “invasive” plant species, found sculptural materials 24 x 48 x 48 in.
Rubble Grid, 2023
Rock, brick, concrete, iron, plexi and foam
Dimensions Vary
Artwork courtesy of realm.nyc
Pictured:
A. Sef
A. Sef’s participatory and interactive installation invites gallery visitors to collect urban debris or rubble found within walking and rolling distance of Root Division and add the objects to the installation’s table top grid, where the objects can be touched, held, rearranged, and/or taken home. Rubble Grid asks us to think about our built environments as urban ecologies and the materials that are used to construct our urban and social lives. A. Sef’s use of rubble challenges ideas supporting colonial romanticized beliefs of what is natural. These romantic beliefs about the land are often used to express reverence for one kind of natural world while hiding extractive practices and the erasure of people. The tabletop grid along with the collected rubble, compares the extractive practices of urban development to the extractive practices fueling the wellness industry. Both industries contribute to environmental destruction as well as inhumane conditions for impacted communities. Rubble Grid reclaims debris as worthy pieces of earth for anticolonial ritual, grieving, and celebration. Rubble Grid is part of a larger project known as Void Spa, in which A. Sef collaborates with sound artist Akeema-Zane to design immersive environments that stimulate alternative senses than a typical spa might.
Image Description: A tactile and participatory installation with a black table and cushioned stools. The black table surface has a clear tabletop scattered with objects that are brought into the gallery by visitors. Gallery visitors are invited to touch and move the objects as they please, and the collection of objects grows and changes throughout the exhibition. Objects pictured here include a piece of brick with visible but unrecognizable text, some charred pieces of blue plastic, a round gray stone, sharp and rough black volcanic stone, a crushed piece of styrofoam, a shard of blue pottery, and small bits of brightly painted red debris. They are grouped and arranged in a loosely organic pattern, with some stacked on top of each other.
Maia Scott
Many of Maia Scott's creative works spiral around the idea of a labyrinth, or a maze with a single path leading to the center. Her choreographed works are invitations for the body-mind-spirit to move with the cosmic spirals for centering, prayer, grief, solidarity, playful abandon, tactility, or sharing space. As an educator and artist, Maia teaches labyrinth making through "Seed Patterns", which are a handful of marks on a page that when connected become a maze. Maia’s labyrinth-making is deeply spiritual. She asks, “aren’t we really humanature, co-creating a kind of sacredness with each other and the land?” She often co-creates labyrinths that range from works made for fingers and tactile moments to walking labyrinths that take over entire floors. Maia’s work encourages us to slow down and acknowledge that we are part of many ecologies, especially interdependent ecologies. Several individual works within Maia’s installation came to fruition with the help of disabled and elder communities and Maia’s family.
Image Description: A wide angle view of a gallery wall with multiple paper and sculptural elements installed covering it from floor to ceiling. In the center is a female figure, a tracing of Maia cut from metallic paper, with arms outspread wide, and hair unfurled, becoming branch shaped, and feet that are turning into roots and spreading onto the floor. Where Maia's womb would be sits a tactile labyrinth made from green and blue paper. In all upwards directions many hands with labyrinth shapes drawn on them are cut from paper and secured to the wall, running onto the ceiling. Next to the portrait of Maia is a silhouette of Gleam, Maia's guide dog, with feet up in the air. Gleam's harness is also made sculptural from green paper and many labyrinth covered eyes cut from paper are secured to the wall above Gleam. Five large circular labyrinths painted with tactile material are dotting the upper corners of the wall. A basket with scissors and drawing tools and another with found paper is hanging on the far left, for participants to cut out a silhouette of their own hand to add to another area of Maia's installation.
Pictured: Garden of Sacred dis|Embodiment, 2024
(includes elements created over the last decade)
Installation with mixed media including repurposed materials
Dimensions Vary
Ruth Tabancay
Ruth Tabancay's densely large crocheted wall sculpture undulates with organic forms and textures that look like a dying coral reef. The gray, brown and white colors add to the textures found in the reef’s skeletal body. Ruth’s sculpture weaves together yarn with medical waste, from plastic delivery systems used in her own self treatment. Knowing that plastics can be life giving, Ruth’s sculpture highlights her own medical needs, frustration and sorrow that further complicate the complex relationships between human, health, and water ecologies. In her delicate arrangements and crochet work Bleached, Ruth depicts the interior skeleton of a complex organism facing climate change, a dying reef drained of color.
Image Description: In the upper right, a wide view of Ruth's sculpture, and below and to the left, details of the sculpture. Densely textured yarn in white, faded grays, and light brown is crochets into organic, loopy patterns with larger half-spheres of white protruding from the wall. Delicate wrinkles, ruffles, and curls undulate, interspersed with white medical plastic caps and clear tubing. In detail images, the individual crochet patterns are visible, including one half-sphere that is covered in loops that have an almost brain texture. Much longer thin, clear medical tubing spools out of the center of some of the crochet circles, casting translucent shadows on the wall.
Pictured: Bleached, 2022 Crochet, assemblage of white medical plastic caps and clear tubing on polystyrene, pins 36 x 40 x 6 in.
Aura Valdes
Aura Valdes is a Queer, Colombian, Krip poet, and activist making layered and collaged digital photographs from their writing and lived experience. Keep Looking is a self portrait of a trans man wrapped in grasses. My dreams Landed is an orb of magnified ecologies that have been reversed and float in between ecologies. The almost endless depth created with Aura’s layering of organic imagery depicts their intimate and seamless relationship with the land while reclaiming a queer narrative. Aura writes, “My work pieces together a narrative of queerness. My body was built for the in-between spaces, and I am an expression of that.”
My Dreams Landed Image Description:
A digital art print, Of white and pink flower tendrils, With small green leaves, Magnified, Against a reversed image, Of blue sky in gray concrete.
Keep Looking Image Description:
A digital art print featuring a Colombian Trans man. Posing bare chested for a self portrait. Negative shadow images, of grass. Laying across his face, and upper body.
Pictured top to bottom:
My dreams Landed, 2022
Digital mixed media 16 x 12 in.
Keep Looking, 2022
Mixed media/photography 16 x 16 in.
Ines Villalobos
Ines Villalobos paints vibrant, energetic paintings that are inspired by nature and that bring her joy. Born in Mexico, Ines likes to paint butterflies, flowers, insects and birds that Ines says makes it “look like they are having a party”. Her paintings are made from acrylic paint, oil pastel and ink and have rows of dots that give everything a sense of motion and vibration. Her dense layers are made up of paint and glitter that gather in drips and blobs with lots of textures.
Pictured:
Water With Dots and Leaves, 2023
Acrylic paint and glitter on canvas 36 x 36 in.
Image Description: A painting on canvas pictured in full on the right and in two details on the next page. The painting is a thick layering of colorful linework, and large areas of overlapping colors. The upper half starts with deep greens, bits of blue, some loosely triangular areas of dark red, and surprising slashes of white and yellow. Just below the middle is a belt of mostly light sky blue with some white interjected with a red boxy shape that also curves to outline some of the light blue. The lower third is dominated by red on the left with spots of yellow, breaking into pink, more sky blue, and dark underlayers on the lower right corner. Throughout the painting, dripped paint and sparkling multicolored glitter create a layer of movement and texture. In the detail images the layers are more clear, with sequins glued to the canvas, puffy paint, and glitter paint in what seems like ten or more layers. On the left side a jagged red line is drawn with red puffy paint, and rows of sequins are shining, then covered by blue or white paint. On the right side an angle view shows how much the glitter and sequins protrude from the surface of the canvas.
Events
The Crip'd Ecologies exhibition featured these 17 visual artists, and for six weeks the space was brought to life by workshops, performances, and screenings. With an opening set by Beast Nest and closing with a series of dance films, our programs created opportunities for creating, sharing, and building community across disability. The next several spreads highlight some moments from the brilliant interactive and live works by participating artists, many of whom built cross disability programs so their work could be accessible in person and online.
Beast Nest
A project of queer South Asian electronic musician and artist Sharmi Basu, Beast Nest performed a sound set at the opening. They describe their music as "the sewage pipes of the body and the patriarchy congeal[ing] into watery soundscapes as a vehicle for achieving liberation…"
Image Description: An olive skinned person with black hair dyed with streaks of white is reaching forward to manipulate the keys of a synthesizer. They are wearing large, chunky glasses, a face mask, a kaffiyeh, and a silky sky blue colored shirt with prints of puffy clouds. Their head is tilted down in concentration and their hair is bundled in a springy top knot.
Photo courtesy Hunter Ridenour
Vanessa Hernández Cruz
For a Bay Area premiere, Vanessa performed her new work, a multimedia project that uses dance, video and sound to examine the spiral of connected and disconnectedness that technology and social media provide. Through gestures that oscillate between intimacy and exasperation, video and sound clips that flash sensuality and despair, and props that stand in for devices or irons and chains, Vanessa moves quickly between states that suggest the dizzying effects of the compartmentalized identities we build.
Image Description: A female presenting performer is mid movement in the center of the frame in sharp focus, her audience and purple walker Pluto out of focus behind her. She has dazzling glittery eye makeup and a cat eye, a black face mask, and wears an iridescent dress covered partially by a black leather jacket. She reaches one arm up and over her head. She has dark skin and black eyebrows, and hair tied up in a ponytail with glitter highlighting small points of light. Her gesture is in an arc from feet to finger, reaching and gazing towards something up above that we cannot see.
Pictured:
Exhale Static, Inhale Fumes
Alexa Dexa
Alexa presented a hybrid online and in person workshop inviting participants to "approach Crip experiences as a symphony unfolding with our mobility aids, bedscapes, companions, and environments." Participants used objects, bodies and voices to add sounds to a continuously building musical soundscore made live by Alexa.
Image Description: A light skinned person with long dark hair and large square framed glasses is centered on a zoom call with a background of purple and white sparkles and seven animated candles burning. The zoom call is taking place on a computer monitor in the gallery and you can see audio equipment and cables curling out from under it.
Pictured: crafting + casting a songspell for our resonant bodies
Stephanie Heit and Charli Brissey
Video still from a short film where Stephanie can be seen above, between, and below water dressed in black and wearing what seem to be futuristic wings, rows of mood stabilizers attached to her arms and torso. In a spoken performance voice over, Stephanie reads the lines excerpted from her poetry memoir Psych Murders, touching on experiences of shock treatment "whose trauma still left (and leaves) its traces on my bodymind."
Image Description: A female presenting person stands facing the wind in front of a sky with a beautiful gradient of deep to light blue at the horizon. Her head is held high and arms outstretched to the camera with palms open. She is wearing a black tank top and has light colored skin, sandy blond or light brown hair cut short and curling back in a light breeze. The sun is glistening in reflection off of rows and rows of packaged medicine in silver packaging, the pills popped out of the foil and the packages attached to each other and adorning her arms and torso.
Pictured: Mad Flora and Fauna
Petra Kuppers
Video still from a short film where Petra "rides the waves of climate emergencies and experiences of both extinction and resiliency". Through images and text, Petra explores ideas of deep time, queer intimacy and disability landscape by exploring fossils with hands and bodies and a timeline that loops forward and back.
Image Description: A distorted landscape image of a sky as though a portal, centrally located and spherical in shape, with three figures in almost silhouette dancing around it. They seem to be standing on a rocky surface with a small white building and trees behind them, though it can be challenging to discern from another layer of video imagery, of tree branches and sky that hovers over everything in translucent layers of salmon pink with shadows that range from deep red to almost purple in hue.
Pictured: Becoming Fossil
Cynthia Ling Lee
In this short film Cynthia snuggles, dances, and moves among a redwood grove and across a city sidewalk. They wear a mossy outfit with small spore like protrusions and dance at slow speeds. Their movements are compelled by a voice and text layer that "embodies gratitude to moss as beloved elder, as teacher of lessons in crip survivance."
Image Description: A performer looks up to the sky with eyes mostly closed and their lips faintly open. They are partially concealed by a "U" shaped nook of a large redwood burl that is growing spots of vibrant green moss. Subtitles in yellow overlay the video. The performer has olive skin and medium, jet black hair. They are wearing a handmade felted performance outfit made from all shades of mossy green, made by Pamela Rodríguez-Montero.
Pictured: moss time, crip time
Anuj Larvaidya
Anuj brought a team of collaborators to bring Love Simeon to life. In this interactive workshop, the room was activated as a lived cinema experience, with participants passing still frames around a circle and envisioning cinematic images while blindfolded. Untying what Anuj calls the "dense knot" of humansimian sexual politics, a live soundtrack and chorus accompanies this thoughtful journey into the history of animal test subjects for life saving medical treatments.
Image Description: A circle of people sits blindfolded in colorful blue and red blindfolds. Behind them several performers stand reading from scripts. They are wearing white or black and a large medallion of a simian face on their chest. The background of the image is collaged, the white wall replaced by floating faces of monkeys, symmetrical leaf arrangements and the large heart of an oak tree.
Pictured: Love, Simeon, an Imagined Cinema Workshop Photo courtesy Alka Raghuram, collage by Anuj Larvaidya
Darrin Martin
Darrin's Along the Perimeter is a live, 2 channel video projection with sound that is mixed live and thus different every time. It includes footage captured in the artists' backyard during the covid lockdown with the sound of a glass harp being played with hearing aid feedback, situating "sound as an integral part of the multi-dimensional environment."
Image Description: Two large panels with fabric covering them (like a room divider but bigger) are propped in the middle of a gallery with projectors behind them aimed towards them and the camera. In the left panel a spider glows in its web, and on the right a fly rests on a bulbous, wet orb with the background of both out of focus. There is a layer of discoloration in each, like an image about to appear or colors tweaked toward the ultraviolet spectrum.
Pictured: Along the Perimeter
Photo courtesy Robert Zuguitan
Octavia Rose Hingle and Maria BC
In a live performance that activated a sculptural garden, itself an homage to Derek Jarman, Octavia performed a spoken word and movement piece that wove together elements of queer ecologies, plant recognition, and kinship to a soundscape provided by guitar and synthesized sound by Maria BC, lending an earthly eroticism to the tending of plants and lovers.
Image Description: A light skinned masculine presenting person strides forward with an arm raised with palm facing outward. They are mid speech, with a clear face guard and a lacey headband covering curly brown hair, a sheer lace top, low rise black denim jeans and with a clear acrylic walking cane in their other hand. They step directly in front of a raised garden bed, and just behind them are two speakers mounted on stands, between which a person plays a guitar while standing in front of a keyboard. They have a black face mask and long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. Audience members can be seen just to the right side of the frame.
Pictured: under earth
Photo courtesy Robert Zuguitan
Maia Scott
In collaboration with San Francisco's LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, teaching artist Maia Scott shared art and writing prompts for participants to create a "meditation labyrinth altar book" to generate a sense of sacredness that can be carried with them.
Image Description: Artist Maia Scott stands in the center of the gallery with guide dog Gleam and a circle of friends surrounding her. She is holding up a tactile print by artist Megan Bent. Maia wears a long black coat and loose black and white speckled pants. Behind her are artworks by Naomi Ortiz and printworks by artists from across the gallery, lined up on shelves.
Pictured:
Create a Sacred Space Toolkit
Image Description for Installation View on the Next Spread: A wide view of the rear gallery with the same white walls and dark wood floor continuing. Several artworks can be seen on the walls and floor, as well as a variety of seating arranged throughout the gallery. From left to right, Anuj Larvaidya's movie poster shows an olive skinned person with a dark beard leans against a tree with their eyes closed, and headphones dangling from behind the photograph. A dark cube is next to it on the floor, this is A. Sef's sculpture, though from this angle you see stools, a reflective glass top, and a series of small stones on top. Behind the cube a bright yellow dot is painted on the wall, and black and white silhouette paintings by Elana Cooper hang in front. Next to these at a distance is the soft, bulbous forms bulging out of the wall by Ruth Tabancay. In front of Ruth's wall sculpture, just to the right, is the garden by Octavia Rose Hingle. From this angle you see the garden bed, a dark silhouette of branches protruding upward, and the geometric, rusted iron form that hangs down above it from the ceiling.
About Root Division
Staff
Michelle Mansour
Executive Director
Rachel Welles
Managing Director
PJ Gubatina Policarpio
Art Programs Manager
Tianna Bracey
Communications & Design Manager
Tamara Berdichevsky-Ovseiovich
Education Programs Manager
Anisa Esmail
Marketing Coordinator
Catalog Production
Michael Nguyen Graphic Design
Minoosh Zomorodinia
Photographer
Mission
Root Division is a visual arts non-profit in San Francisco that connects creativity and community through a dynamic ecosystem of arts education, exhibitions, and studios. Root Division’s mission is to empower artists, foster community service, inspire youth, and enrich the Bay Area through engagement in the visual arts. The organization is a launching pad for artists, a steppingstone for educators and students, and a bridge for the general public to become involved in the arts.
Supporters
Root Division is supported in part by a plethora of individual donors and by grants from Grants for the Arts, California Humanities, California Arts Council, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and Violet World Foundation.
Image Description on page 67
Pictured: Installation view
Gratitude
We are deeply grateful for Michelle, Rachel, Tianna, Tamara, and everyone at Root Division for months (years!) of support in bringing this project to life. To California Humanities for All for the incredible foundation, support and promotion of all our events. To Naomi Ortiz for guidance, levity and wit. To Cata Gomes, pictured here, for a blessing and a song, which we held tight. And to our vibrant disability communities, to the artists and the activists, the lovers and the fighters, for coming together, sharing space and your creative life giving worlds.
This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit www.calhum.org.
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