Curatorial Statement
—The New Media Artspace Docent Team: Anya Ballantyne, Emily Chavez, Maya Hilbert, Judy Ng, and Leo Ng
Denatured dissects the composition of nature and humanity. At their intersection, nature and humanity are malleable, mutating and melding as they are broken down and reconstructed. Nature borrows traits from humans; humans take assets from nature; and somewhere in between, in the space left by unequal exchanges, something "other" evolves.
In The Earth Talks, Anya Ballantyne gives the Earth a platform of collaged photography to protest its abuse. In the world of The Virtual Ark, Leo Ng builds a zoo without any zoological presence. In Greetings From, a video by Emily Chavez, domestic kittens enter their Age of Exploration. In the video piece 520, Judy Ng fuses human nature and the natural world in an expression of unbound love.
The works in Denatured reject natural laws: nature is no longer nonhuman, and human is no longer artificial. Some works use personification to expose nature's cultural context. Others unmoor from nature, drifting into a domain where properties we take for granted melt away. All pick away at the fence between the wild and the cultivated, questioning both its purpose and jurisdiction. With natural laws removed, what do we build in their place—or what grows in the vacancy?
The Earth Talks displays the environment we are living in and the way it has been affected by humans. Through the use of collaged photos of manmade disasters combined with the beauty of the natural environment, nature is given its own language. Individual titles and evocative visuals urge a state of reflection on what is being communicated. Vibrant images contrast the darker meaning of a world under threat. The Earth Talks.
The Virtual Ark is a virtual world that explores the grim reality of what the near future holds if humanity continues down its destructive path to sacrifice nature for their own selfish needs. A zoo used to be an institution that brought a tiny piece of nature and culture across the world. While it was already defying the law of nature by displacing wildlife, it would soon turn into a figment of imagination as animals slowly became extinct from human interactions. Instead of showcasing, zoos are now in the process of preserving and conserving these animals. The fluid relationship between nature and humanity is solidifying towards a fate where only one remains in the real world and one in the virtual. How far would we go before we lose one of them to the other?
Greetings From follows the adventure of seven house pets as they are each misplaced in a different wonder of the world. As these kittens are taken out of the nature of their own home, they revert back to the nomadic way of living from before they were domesticated. Greetings From highlights how much depth the individual parts of a group can bring. Each kitten in the litter showcases their own personality while also exploring the rich history of one of the wonders of the world.
520 is an expression of love that defies the traditional constructs of man and nature. Overcoming the conditioning that humans are subject to within society, 520 illustrates a love that is so organic and innate that it embodies characteristics of what we see in the natural world. By using various materials in unconventional ways, movements in nature are coalesced, which also reflect the dynamics of a blossoming relationship. Comprehensible objects are not evoked, but the audience is encouraged to immerse themselves in a sensory experience by focusing on tactile quality and sound.
Denatured is curated by the New Media Artspace Docent Team: Anya Ballantyne, Emily Chavez, Maya Hilbert, Judy Ng, and Leo Ng. The exhibition was produced with support from Katherine Behar, Associate Professor in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College. The exhibition is made possible by support from the Baruch Computing and Technology Center (BCTC), the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, and the Newman Library.