We Are All Compost

BIG RAMP is thrilled to announce We Are All Compost, a group show of decomposing compositions of entanglement with the more-than-human world. Curated by William Schwaller, this exhibition brings together a diverse body of work by artists seeking symbiopoeisis with the environment, making with its critters and vibrant matter. Rooted in the materiality of the world around them, these artists embark on collaborations and entanglements with bacteria, composting insects, fungi, plants, soil, and stone in the composition of sculpture, painting, and video.

Come out to Big Ramp this Saturday, March 15 to see the work unfold and chat with the artists from 5- 9 pm!

Nuancing the anthropocentrism within Western artistic traditions of painting and sculpture, these artists’ entanglements with other forms of life relinquish control as the sole authors of artworks conceived as autonomous, timeless objects. Their collaborations produce assemblages of materials that compose and decompose within the lifecycle of the work. Composition and decomposition of matter (either as process, product, or subject) of the work highlight the fruitful, productive, and/or thought provoking ways these artists have chosen to position themselves and their practices on our planet, amidst human-induced climate change, and within blasted landscapes.

The title of the exhibition quotes Donna Haraway, the philosopher queen of our environmental crises, to emphasize the shared materiality and vibrancy of our organic and inorganic world. The works, like ourselves, are all in flux, in cycles of composition and decomposition, and enmeshed with our environments and those with whom we cohabitate.

Bobby Haskell and Narendra Haynes both invite living critters to inhabit and consume the material forms of their work. Respectively, deadwood and Styrofoam are composed by the artists as literal and symbolic fallen trees within which universes of bacteria, fungi, lichen, worms, and insects live and die. These works productively collapse our human dualisms of natural/artificial and outside/inside as communities of more-than-human life transform and compost their forms alike. 

Viola Bordon’s entangled weavings embrace and care for humble stone “bodies” while holding those dualisms in tension. Weaving, a technology gifted to humankind from animal kin, Spider Woman (Na'ashjé'íí Asdzáá) in Navajo mythology, and preserved over centuries through women’s and artisanal labor, is a fitting practice for a symbiopoetics (making with) of human and more-than-human actors. The tension that Bordon’s weavings exert on these stones mimics their originating conditions in the pressure cooker of Earth’s geological formations, while simultaneously preventing, in vain, their gradual erosion by physics and fungi. According to the artist, they serve as metaphors for “the misplaced care” humans frequently, vainly, offer to our damaged planet.

Cindy Stockton Moore’s video installation similarly reminds us that “no city is all city.” Stockton Moore’s videos playfully animate the lives of overlooked and underappreciated living beings within our environments, including the biological and chemical agents with whom she collaborated in her research on soil. With inks made from materials found on site, the paintings animated within her videos connect form and process, material and site.

Nichole van Beek and Rebecca Schultz also appeal to plant and mineral collaborators, crafting natural pigments for paintings that represent and reflect the sumptuousness and the transformations of the environments we traverse. Van Beek’s paintings of mushrooms stemmed from her sculptural collaborations with mycelium to produce living sculptures of mycocomposite and the serendipitous beauty of fungi she encounters while hiking in West Virginia. Schultz’s mural on the gallery’s exterior wall entwines the “natural and human” histories of Kensington and Port Richmond with the very materials that stand as witnesses to these political and ecological transformations of a place. Exposed to the elements this mural will fade, wash and blow away like succumbing to the forces of decay and entropy like everything in the eternal material flux of our universe (Christians are presently reminded during Lent “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”).

We compose We compost

We recompose We decompose

We are all compost We are all lichens We are all stardust