The permanently inhabited portion of the earth is at once ever changing and everlasting; it is both a type of place and a mental image; an idea of what humans require and what they can take.In the context of rapid climate change and seemingly daily ecological catastrophes, the idea of where we can live is deeply intertwined with the question of how we should live. Our bodies occupy specific physical places, yet these sites are also always loaded with symbolic and social signification.
The exhibition Ecumene explores what make a site liveable, engaging with idea of home-making as world-making. This new exhibition brings together two and three dimensional works in a variety of media. Each item in the show involves a physical body in some form: as a cast body part, a presence alluded to in a work’s title, a literal source of bodily residues used in image-making, or as a silhouette/ internal organ / skin surface that was photographed and then incorporated into a finished piece. Arms, feet, fingers, and palatine bones cohabit with man-made landscapes and natural forms cut out of human x-rays and sew onto paper and blackout fabric. Skinscapes and landscapes and intimate cradle paintings invite cosmic interpretations of abstract organic surfaces.
Taken together and viewed in light of the exhibition’s title, the works question who decides what makes a given site inhabitable and how. As the Ancient Greeks and later Romans and later Christians used the term “Ecumene,” it evolved to imply a civilizing mission based on the world as a unified whole – as determined by those doing the naming. Today in a world rife with conflict and fragmented along social and economic lines, the idea of a singular modern world remains hopelessly romantic if not crudely offensive to those left on the outside.
