| Summary: | rinse and repeat is a collaborative thesis exhibition of art created by my plant collaborators and I that uses the visual language of sculpture, photography, performance, audio narratives, and collaboration to question the devaluation of life within imperial-capitalist culture. I work intimately with Fungi and Moss through attempts at listenings to seek to unlearn individualism and apparati of separation. This thesis exhibition consists of both indoor and outdoor components, as collaboration with the Land is vital to redefining the personhood or beinghood of autonomous beings and the white-cube gallery is an inhospitable environment for my collaborators. Materials range from gathered wooden limbs to Soil, sawdust, plywood, copper gilding, gold gilding, and photography on paper, as well as Moss and Fungi. Each artwork has undergone a transformative process through iterative choices that lean towards interspecies collaboration and away from scientific-mechanistic indoctrination. By working alongside different Fungi and Mosses, I have come to realize that my upbringing in the imperial-capitalist system was unethical, violent, and delusional. The breadth of my research is sustained through thoughtful actions that have real life consequences, as all life is intrinsically linked and ethically bound together. The aim of this thesis is to address alienating ways of living, making, and behaving, and extending collaboration to gallery visitors through walking tours and performance. This accompanying support paper has three sections that articulate artistic methodology and theoretical contexts for the thesis artwork. The first section, “Intangible Transference: A Reevaluation of Beinghood”, is a mixture of descriptions, reflections, and conceptual underpinnings about each artwork. Forming the pieces began with simply connecting to beings in habitats, recording auditory reflections of site-specific areas, constructing, or sculpting habitats, and taking meditative walks through the in-between spaces of the urban and ...
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