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ISSUE 62 — WINTER 2023

Earthly Observatory explores how we sense, portray, and engage our deep planetary entanglements. Through crafted visions, close listening, and histories of conquest and protest, the exhibition examines the contested relations of ecology to economy, aesthetics to ethics that dominate our experience at one moment, and evades awareness in the next. Drawn from diverse practices across art, design, and the natural sciences, the works invite us to question the ways that we—as one among many earthlings—create our understanding of a manifold world.

 

Our idea of an “earthly observatory” encompassed more than the notion of Earth as a planet but expanded to map an intimate, embedded, and grounded network of naturalcultural points of view. In our conception, an earthly observatory would take advantage of what Donna Haraway has called the “privilege of partial perspective.” Foregoing any attempt at a definitive account, the earthly rhizomatically seeks out “situated knowledges” whose “images are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above) but the joining of partial views ...” Alas, “the only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular”.

This issue of Antennae, which completes the “earthly tryptic” project of 2023, is a companion to the exhibition Earthly Observatory held at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago between August 30th and December 3rd, 2021 curated by Giovanni Aloi and Andrew S. Yang. It features the work of every artist as well as the transcript of three panel discussions and a curatorial conversation. Earthly Observatory would not have been possible without the support of SAIC Galleries and the tireless commitment of its dedicated and professional staff.

Dr. Giovanni Aloi
Editor in Chief

Andrew S. Yang
Co-Editor

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in this issue

Allora & Calzadilla

Giovanni Aloi

Jonas N.T. Becker

Xavier Cortada

Kelly Church

Rena Detrixhe

Paul Dickinson

Mark Dion

Jeannette Ehlers

Terry Evans

Assaf Evron

Terike Haapoja

Paul Harfleet

Isao Hashimoto

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar

Heap of Birds

Amanda Hess

Katie Kingery-Page

Tim Lamey

Martyl Langsdorf

Meredith Leich

Norman W. Long

John Low

Peggy Macnamara

Nandipha Mntambo

Shane O’Neill

Cherish Parrish

Claire Pentecost

Ken Rinaldo

Zoé Strecker

Cole Swanson

Anaïs Tondeur

Walter Tschinkel

Katrina Valera

Erin Wiersma

Andrew S. Yang

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Conditions of representation


How do we generate earthly knowledge and how do disciplinary lenses define what we see? Every act of seeing is an entangled instant in which two things manifest at once: what something is, together with what we imagine something to be.

Mark Dion

 

Roundup: An Entomological Endeavor for the Smart Museum of Art, 2000/2006

Often concerned with questions of epistemology and representation, Mark Dion’s work is firmly grounded in institutional critique. Appropriating natural history methodologies and disrupting disciplinary ideologies, the artist produces empowering works of art that invite us to directly engage with the natural world.

Zoé Strecker

 

Breeder’s Envy (Makrospondylitic Thoroughbred Skeleton Mount), 2013

By extending the skeleton of an actual horse to the absurd length of 20 feet, Strecker—who lives in the famed horseracing state of Kentucky—fashioned what she calls “the stretch limou- sine of Thoroughbreds.” The work wryly reflects on the extreme alterations hu- mans make to other species for their own questionable ends.

Cole Swanson

Carefully painted on paper,

Swanson’s miniaturized cowhides problematize the relationship between representation and indexicality, observation and consumption.

specimen hides

Peggy Macnamarathe 

selected works

Macnamara captures that eerie embodiment of this living fossil, a specimen of which resides at the Field Museum of Natural History here in Chicago. While the details and proportions are exacting,
her free use of color sets her illustrations apart as expressive works rather than simply scientific renderings.

Paul Dickinson

Music for Worms and Compost 2004/2021

By way of sensitive subterranean

microphones, Dickinson captures and mixes the sounds alive within his custom compost boxes, creating a kind of otherwise inaudible music that is both for and of the earthworms busily buried inside.

Amanda Hess & Shane O’Neill

Watched These Pandas Have Sex. I’ve Never Been So Happy 2020

In this New York Times video, internet and pop culture critic Amanda Hess reflects on the underlying meaning of the “coronavirus nature genre” that swept into popular attention on the web during the early months of the pandemic.

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Relative visibilities


Human-scaled senses limit our perception of the multitudes and magnitudes that compose the worlds we are so intimately interwoven within. The technologies of art and science expand oursensorium, decentering our anthropocentric perspectives by giving view into the otherwise inacces- sible expanses: deep time, microscopic vitalities, or what simply teems below the surface of things.

Walter Tschinkel

 

Fire Ants’ Nest Cast, 2010

Biologist Walter Tschinkel studies the rules that underlie the emergence of ant nest architectures, and how, in turn, those structures regulate the social behavior of the colony. To study these otherwise invisible structures, Tschinkel developed a number of novel techniques, including that of plaster and molten metal casting of recently abandoned nests.

Ken Rinaldo

 

Borderless Bacteria / Colonialist Cash, 2021

Harnessing the highly charged

signification of banknotes as markers of national identity, Rinaldo’s work points at the untamable bio-flux of invisible organisms that travel the world unmonitored.

Meredith Leich

Animated Drawings for a Glacier, 2018–2021

Engaging glacial landscapes

at opposite coasts of North America—from the moraine that forms Cuttyhunk Island off Mas- sachusetts to icebergs calving
from the Kennicott Glacier in southwestern Alaska—Leich makes charcoal sketches that both trace and abstract different stages of the glacial process.

Xavier Cortada

 

Diatoms, 2016
 

Cortada’s installation invites us

to reframe our understanding
of ecosystemic agency beyond
the limitations of human vision. His ceramic portraits of diatoms foreground the individuality of each microorganism while alluding to its fragility.

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Seeing, making, and tracing


Tracings of soil, mappings of continents, and modelings of territories record our contested histories upon the surface of the Earth: criss-crossing legacies of op portunity,displacement,enslaveme nt, and extraction. In abandoning the abstraction of borders and empires, just and sustainable futures can emerge—through marks made and unmade.

Nandipha Mntambo

Buhlungu besikhala selu tsandvo (The unkind spaces of love), 2013

Grounded in speculative aesthetics and modeled against her own body, Mntambo’s taxidermy skins merge abstraction and figuration. They establish a metaphorical continuity between the female and animal body as conflicted cultural and biological sites.

Tim Lamey

 

Stacks of Lumber at Sawmill, 2017 Log Yard at Papermill, 2014

Lamey reconfigures the representational tradition of the western landscape to produce evocative images that reject the sensationalism of nineteenth- century sublime aesthetics. This is the new nature, no longer virginal or uncontaminated.

Erin Wiersma

 

Trasect series, 2018-19

During annual managed burns of

Konza prairie in Kansas, artist Erin Wiersma draws from and with this tallgrass fire landscape. Wiersma’s portraits of the prairie index and record the dynamic relationship between the land, plants, air, and people.

Katie Kingery-Page

 

Grassland Interview (Voices), 2018–ongoing

Katie Kingery-Page interviews three scientists—Clenton Owensby, John Blair, and Shelly Wiggam—as they reflect on the history, ecology, and management of the Konza tallgrass prairie ecosystem today including the role of wildlife, fire, and other dynamics in play.

Claire Pentecost

 

Earth Oculi, 2015–2018

Produced from soil from watersheds in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, the chromatographs loosely map where the soils were sampled, forming a kind of geographic constellation. The variation in hues and patterns make visible the distinct geology, biology, and cultural histories of each site, both abstractly and indexically.

SAIC’s ARC Land Acknowledgment

 

Land and Territorial Acknowledgment Practices, 2021

This installation was designed by

subcommittee members of SAIC’s Anti-Racism Committee (ARC) dedicated to the establishment
of Indigenous land and territorial acknowledgment practices, and related initiatives at the School.

Jonas N.T. Becker

 

Blank Topographies, 2017-2019

Each year, Becker selects a

topography relief map of the most expensive mountain real estate in the US as determined by market values. The maps are purchased preformed from commercial websites where collectors trade them in a hobbyist market that mirrors the luxury real estate market.

Jeannette Ehlers

 

The Gaze, 2019

As we watch this video performance by Ehlers, a Danish-Trinidadian artist, we are watched in turn; a confrontation as well as inversion emerges between the gaze of the viewer and the viewed. Immigrant and minority communities the world over find their roots in the legacy of colonial empire built directly upon war, displacement, and slavery perpetrated by cultures of the Global North.

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds

 

Native Hosts for Chicago, 2021

In his ongoing site-specific series, Native Hosts, Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation) uses the visual language of institutional signage to invert power relations and reaffirm native groups’ historical occupation of land.

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Vulnerability and community


Life is interdependence, creating the potential for resilience, as well as unique vulnerability. While the relationships of creatures as parts in a planetary whole are myriad, it is through narratives—of solidarity, resistance, kinship, and rebirth— that we cultivate our connection as earthlings.

Terry Evans

 

Selected works, 2015-21

These aerial photographs from Terry Evans’s larger series Petcoke vs. Grassroots document the intensive petro industry on Chicago’s Southeast Side along the Calumet River and the resulting pollution that local residents and activists have struggled against for years.

Rena Detrixhe

 

Red Dirt Rug, 2021
 

Working with finely sifted and refined clay soil from Oklahoma, Detrixhe offers a meditation on the complex relationship between people and the land on which they rely. The red dirt evokes the fraught history of landscape—the Trail of Tears, the Dust Bowl, and the crude oil that continues to be extracted from under its surface.

Cherish Parrish

 

The Next Generation 2011

Learning black ash basket weaving

from her mother Kelly Church, Parrish (Pottawatomi/Ottawa, Match-e-be-nash she-wish Tribe) continues as the sixth generation in this tradition. Woven to suggest the form of a pregnant woman, this basket both figuratively and metaphorically embodies the intergenerational connection of basket weaving, honoring Native women as “carriers of culture” in myriad forms.

Kelly Church

 

Sustaining Traditions – Then and Now 2020
 

This green basket resembles an

emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle that, since its arrival in Michigan in 2002, has ravaged the very ash trees on which her basket- weaving depends. In this way, Church’s basket comes to embody the Midwest’s rapidly changing ecology as well as an expression of cultural continuity in the face of such ongoing environmental transformation.

Anaïs Tondeur

 

Chernobyl Herbarium, 2011–ongoing

These ghostly-looking photogenic

im- prints of plants are part of an anthropogenic herbarium for our time. Each year, the artist produces a new print to commemorate the reactor explosion that, in April 1986, destroyed the Chernobyl (Ukraine) nuclear power station. The images are direct imprints on photo.

Norman W. Long

 

Big Marsh Soundscape (Penthouse Mix), 2018 Sound

Since 2015, sound artist and

trained landscape architect Norman W. Long has been following the ecological restoration of a former industrial dumping grounds called Big Marsh

in Chicago’s South Deering neighborhood.

Paul Harfleet

 

The Pansy Project, 2005-ongoing

The Pansy Project began in 2005 after Harfleet and his partner endured a string of homophobic abuse on a warm summer day in Manchester. Since then, Harfleet has planted pansies at sites where such assaults have taken place.

Terike Haapoja

 

Entropy, 2004
 

This green basket resembles an

Using thermosensitive cameras,

Haapoja captures the invisible cooling of a horse’s body after death—the warmest areas appear red and orange while the cooling parts turn into shades of blue. Entropy is an intimate and poignant reflection on how we might value all animal life and recognize its importance.

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Down to earth

During the 20th century, the planet was often seen as both inexhaustible, and yet also not quite enough. Extraterrestrial worlds, worlds of progress, new dreams and nightmares of the atomic age all transfixed the modern imagination. If the current Anthropocene era was born of those failed promises, can it also open space for a revolutionary wisdom in its wake?

Martyl Langsdorf
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

 

Doomsday Clock and editions of the Bulletin, ongoing

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists started as a publication in 1945, the year two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was founded by Manhattan Project scientists who saw an immediate need for a public reckoning. In 1947, Martyl Langsdorf created a clock for the first artistically designed cover of the magazine to convey the urgent threat of atomic weapons.

Isao Hashimoto

 

1945–1998, 2003
 

The atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II were only the beginning of a much longer “Cold War” among superpowers that enveloped the globe for decades to come. Despite the utter destructiveness and inhumanity of nuclear weapons, nations the world over continue to pursue and develop them.

Assaf Evron

 

Untitled (S.R. Crown Hall), 2016, 2004
 

Evron’s photographs of van der

Rohe’s windows at S.R. Crown
Hall on the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus, allude
to the failure of Modernism as
a pivotal moment of reckoning between idealism and reality in the history of the West.

Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies, Field Museum of Natural History

 

Assorted Meteor-wrongs, dates variable

As a souvenir of the sublime, meteorites hold a special place in our imagination— as the trace of a “shooting star” one made a wish upon, or ancient extraterrestrial presence.

Allora & Calzadilla

 

The Great Silence, 2014

Humans invest in monumental scientific instruments like the now- defunct Arecibo Radio telescope in Puerto Rico in that extraterrestri- al search, while blithely ignoring and extinguishing the intelligent non-human life that already surrounds us.

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Public programs

Earthly Observatory: A Mapping

 

In conversation: Giovanni Aloi and Andrew S. Yang

Earthly Observatory encompassed seven large gallery spaces organized across two floors and it included the work of over 30 artists, scientists, and scholars. Drawn from diverse practices across art, design, and the natural sciences, the works invite us to question the ways that we —as one among many earthlings— generate our understanding of a manifold world.

Acknowledging place, acknowledging peoples

 

In conversation: Giovanni Aloi,

Andrew S. Yang, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, John Low, and Katrina Valera

How do practices of land acknowledgment that honor deep historical connections of Indigenous peoples to colonially settled territories take shape? This event brings together artists, scholars, curators, and activists to critically examine the intersections of art, activism, place, and identity.

Aethics of observation

 

In conversation: Giovanni Aloi,

Andrew S. Yang, Mark Dion, and

Zoé Strecker

More recently, contemporary artists have been reconsidering the expressive potential of materiality in an attempt to blur notions of natural and artificial. What is “real” if knowledge is ultimately a matter of perception or representation, and how might an ethics of observation help make sense of this question?

Material thinking

 

In conversation: Giovanni Aloi,

Andrew S. Yang, Rena Detrixhe,

Nandipha Mntambo, and Erin Wiersma

The New Materialist turn can be
seen as a creative move away from anthropocentric conceptions of nature, a move that acknowledges how “being human” essentially is a collaborative process where other forms of life and non-life play defining roles.

From the ground up:

curatorial considerations

 

In conversation: Giovanni Aloi

and Andrew S. Yang

Curators Giovanni and Andrew Yang consider the challenges involved in curating Earthly Observatory through the COVID-19 pandemic and giving serious consideration to the ethical questions involved in staging exhibition in the Anthropocene.

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