Casey Tang
Alumni
To Carry the Earth
Casey Tang
Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space
Artists Alliance, Inc.
Jun 3 – July 29, 2023
Drawing from the artist’s extensive research into the history of systems science and psycholinguistic spatial frames of reference (FoR), the site-specific project speaks to the ways individuals, communities, and cultures make sense and relate to phenomena.
The conceptual framework of the installation is inspired by the artist’s experience designing large-scale agroforestry and sociotechnical systems, which present a biosemiotic network relationality nested in an absolute geocentric FoR. This revised system accommodates a multiscalar, predicate-value logic, largely absent in egocentric frameworks, as a proposition to root humans with our logic and senses in consensual coordinates tethered to place.
Tang’s sculpture, Here we are, hanging out in a Patritus, Bruno, Gassendi, or Newtonian Void, explores the lineage of Western thought structures, which rely heavily on a logic that often overlooks the importance of our senses and the contextual information that is crucial for situational awareness. The sculpture is comprised of 3D printed and silicon recreations of natural objects—snail shell, lotus flower, log growing lichen, human hand—hovering in mid-air, alluding to the Enlightenment-era emphasis on rational thought, disconnected from embodied experiences and the physical world. As with the audio installation, To Carry the Earth, showcasing an array of ecosystems and creatures in geocentric relationality, the levitating objects investigate Western knowledge systems’ lack of groundedness in the physical, Earthly realm.
In his exhibition essay, “To Expect Worlds, Carry the Earth,” Tang writes:“Under the shade of tree canopies, a ghost flower (Monotropa uniflora) grows on the dark forest floor. The parasitic flower, glowing bone white, does not generate food from sunlight like other plants, green from chlorophyll. Instead, the ghost flower utilizes an underground mycelium network to extract nutrients from its photosynthesizing tree hosts without giving back to them. In a monologue, the flower does not incorporate its enveloping environment into its logic or computation. Like us, it only needs a suitable network to access a host or, in our case, resources to survive. In deep shade, ghost flowers face down, only growing away from the sun.”
Read Tang’s full exhibition essay here.
