From the Earth

Reception: Friday, June 10, 6­:00–8:00 p.m.
Participatory Event with Torey Erin: Love Letters to Earth II, Thursday, August 4, 6:00 p.m.
Non-MCAD visitors must RSVP via Eventbrite

From the Earth is an exhibition that brings together eight artists who explore our intricately-connected relationship to the natural world. Their diverse practices center around the poetic use of terrene materials, interior and exterior places, and how the disengagement with our bodies is linked to the environmental crisis.

The exhibition is inspired by environmental activist and Buddhist scholar, Joanna Macy’s theory of the “The Great Turning”­— described as an epochal global evolution from the industrial growth society to life sustaining civilization. Macy outlines three dimensions of “The Great Turning”: Holding Actions—activism that slows down the industrial growth society’s damage to the earth; Structural Change—replacing outdated and destructive systems with new structural alternatives; Shift in Consciousness­—the development of the ecological self by cultivating awareness of our non-separateness from the world by acknowledging the earth is our larger body.

The exhibition addresses the question: What is the artist’s role in “The Great Turning?” The artist becomes a visual communicator of these dimensions of transformation by engaging the viewer’s body as a living system through the interconnectivity of materials, encountering our humanness through images of the inner and outer worlds we inhabit, and broadening our perception of time, from short-term thinking to contemplating deep, ecological time.

Participating Artists:

• Tom Bierlein ’19
• Mira Burack
• Torey Erin
• Marcella Ernest
• Keli Mashburn
• Elsa Muñoz
• Leah Meridoc Nguyen
• Meg Ojala