Between the Sky and the Earth
Roots & Culture
July 1 - August 5, 2017
Featuring works by Liza Sylvestre, Cory Imig, Karen Spiering, Preetika Rajgariah, Sue Kay Lee, Courtney Cross, and Dulcee Boehm.
Between the Sky and the Earth considers the mutually constitutive nature of human identity and locality, and how this relationship is critically informed by the production of space, culture, gender, and language. Dealing with spatialized subjectivity is central to these artists’ work, who through visual poetics, site-specific intervention, and inquiries of materiality, point at desire as the axis of human’s relationship to the land. Although Western civilization has corrupted this desire with its hunger for conquest, at its core this longing is rooted in the need to belong. The impetus to belong connects us to a network of spaces which, once organized, produce place. This longing illuminates humans fractured relationship to land and nature. The intensity of this divorce coupled with capitalist ideals “exacerbate the effects of the alienation and fragmentation in contemporary life” (Miwon Kwon). Yet, we question with urgency how our identity is bound to locality and how cultural production fits within globalization’s vision.
Photos by Robert Chase Heishman
