Current:
FIELD: Dwelling Landscape, exhibition at lower_cavity, Western Massachusetts.
November 16-January 10, 2022/23
Reception: November 17, 5-8pm
lower_cavity 416 Dwight St, Holyoke, Massachusetts | By appointment only
For the culmination of their month-long residency at lower_cavity, artists Supermrin and Jessica Fertonani Cooke present “FIELD: Dwelling Landscape,” an exhibition of sculptures and performances that advances their on-going collaborative project FIELD. Referencing Tim Ingold’s conception of landscape as a ‘dwelling perspective’ in their exhibition title, Supermrin and Fertonani Cooke consider the manicured lawns of North America as a biological archive in which accumulations of labor, capital, and subjectivity lie enmeshed. In the geological era understood as the Anthropocene, they ask, in what ways have lawn grasses, the single largest irrigated crop in the United States, functioned as a proxy for a colonized conception of Nature?
The sculptural works in the exhibition, composed of FIELD’s unique grass-based bioplastic, embody this alienated relationship with the natural world, staging it within the context of the post-industrial city of Holyoke and the 19th century mill architecture housing lower_cavity’s project space. Over the course of the exhibition, a series of collaborative performances, “Braiding FIELD,” will develop between the sculptures and the space, serving as psychomagic rituals that channel the legacies of women's labor. Employing simple, repetitive prompts, these performances are designed to refocus the body on its interiority and encourage deeper listening to the land.
Together, Supermrin and Fertonani Cooke articulate a reimagined understanding of landscape that orients us towards nodes of origin and cycles of life and death. Operating at an intersection of sculpture, performance, bioethics, and the fraught arenas of urban space, FIELD offers approaches for navigating the politics of control perpetuated by the infrastructures of our cities within a globally interconnected and shrinking world.
FIELD was conceived by Supermrin in 2019 in partnership with Jessica Fertonani Cooke. FIELD’s unique grass-based bioplastic was developed in collaboration with material designer Jil Berenblum in 2020. The project has grown to include collaborators (artists, architects, designers, and performers) from across the world, including Xenia Adjoubei and Ane Gonzalez-Lara; with site-specific projects in Oakland, New York, Massachusetts, Cardiff (Wales), Nice (France), and Boiçucanga (Brazil). Exhibitions include the Venice Biennale for Architecture (2021), Untitled Art Fair Miami (2021), Climate Provocations Pavillion Governors Island (2021), Midway Gallery San Francisco (2022), Tactile Bosch Cardiff (2022) amongst other venues, with support from the Franklin Furnace Fund, British Council, Pratt Institute, NYFA City Artist Corps Grant, and others. For inquiries, contact supermrin@streetlight.space.
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