Inherit, Yield, Regenerate
June 5, 2024
I curated Inherit, Yield, Regenerate for NEW INC's DEMO Festival, which opened on June 5, 2024 at WSA in New York. This exhibition brings together the work of seven artists and collectives who have been in community with one another for the past nine months as members in NEW INC’s Creative Science track.
Chando Ao, Craftwork, MORAKANA, OUTOFSEAM, Martha Poggioli, Tao Leigh Goffe, and Iz Nettere utilize natural and synthetic fibers, fungi, plant matter, malleable surgical grade plastics, electromagnetic waves, and various states of material transformation. The experimental works on view actualize and propose a surpassing of scientific boundaries through vibrant, evolutionary forms of mutation, superpowers, and magical knowledge passed between ancestral generations.
Ao’s foot becomes a vessel for flowering life, while our hands become ultrahydrophobic, like lotus leaves, with the application of his engineered particles, suggesting a medium that might make us amphibious again. OUTOFSEAM’s plant-dyed fabrics carry their origins in family and colonial histories. Goffe’s fermentation and pickling processes join global diasporic traditions and anti-imperialist struggles at a singular banquet. Nettere bridges biological, chemical, photochemical, and digital processes to fix the latent nature of non-fruiting mycelium.
MORAKANA imagines an organism’s future phylogenetic adaptation to the electromagnetic spectrum to find nourishment in persistent and ever-present 5G wifi waves, which may exist long after human life on earth. Poggioli transfigures surgical grade plastics into messy, organic compositions inspired by biomorphic shapes encountered during medical procedures. Craftwork absorbs and illuminates the viewer’s voice within a tapestry of encoded histories inspired by Incan Quipu and Underground Railroad quilt ciphers.
The qualities and concerns shared and divergent between the Creative Science track members, who are assembled as ever by chance, speak to transformational and chemical reactions of making and regeneration.
Photos by Dario Lasagni