Qualcomm Institute’s gallery@calit2 Welcomes Environmentally-Conscious Art Exhibition

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A new art exhibition coming to the Qualcomm Institute’s gallery@calit2 on Thursday, March 7^th showcases environmentally-informed artistic engagements with the intersection of vertical and horizontal planes. “EARTH/SKY” features the work of three artists who explore how the meeting of earth and sky is imagined and manufactured within complex ecologies of time, aesthetics and power.

The exhibition was curated by the Winchester School of Art’s Ryan Bishop, Professor of Global Art and Politics, and Jussi Parikka, Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics. Artist Susan Schuppli’s installation, “Nature Represents Itself,” is a simulation showing the surface slick and subsurface plumes resulting from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Produced in 2018, this simulation is exhibited with audio detailing the lawsuit led on behalf of the rights of nature against BP. Schuppli presents the oil spill in its aesthetic and legal forms to propose the ecological site as a material witness fully capable of representing its own damaged condition.

An ongoing multimedia project begun in 2016, Netherlands-based artist Femke Herregraven’s “Sprawling Swamps” is a series of fictional infrastructures dispersed within the cracks of the contemporary financial geography that operate on a technological, legal and social level. The infrastructures are located in specific locations, from swamps to shorelines, and engage with the immaterial economies of value and the notion of infrastructure as it relates to nature’s turbulent and unstable dynamic.

The third piece in the show, Heba Y. Amin’s “As Birds Flying,” comments on politics, surveillance, paranoia and environmental manipulation. Taking an incident from 2013, in which a stork fitted with an electronic device for migratory research was mistaken for a non-human source of surveillance and thus taken into custody by Egyptian officials, Amin’s work becomes a meditation on migration of birds in parallel to human migration and the control of rural territories.

EARTH/SKY will premiere from 5-7:30 p.m. on March 7^th with a panel discussion and reception hosted by Professor Jordan Crandall, of UC San Diego’s Visual Arts Department. The exhibition will be on display at QI’s gallery@calit2 in Atkinson Hall through June 7^th, 2019.

Agenda for opening night:

5:00pm Calit2 Auditorium; Atmospheric Feedback Loops Screening

5:30pm Panel Discussion with Ryan Bishop, Jussi Parikka, Susan Shuppli, and Femke Herregraven, Moderated by Jordan Crandall

6:30pm Reception

The gallery@calit2 brings multimedia exhibitions that exist at the intersection of art, science and technology to the campus community. Visit the website for a glimpse at past exhibitions and announcements.

gallery@calit2 events are FREE and open to the public

RSVP requested to galleryinfo@calit2.net

More info at http://gallery.calit2.net