Alicia Escott’s multi-channel video installation, Metabolic Rifts: Touch Memory, marks the culmination of a multi-year practice making art and cultivating community, while growing plants native to the dune ecologies of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Initially, she did so alone, seeding compost in discarded plastic bags with plants that provide homes to varieties of insects, including the extinct Xerxes butterfly. The resulting, informal, sculptural objects were both post-apocalyptic and hopeful, toxic and resilient. Seemingly suffocated by the plastic in which they were planted, the plants nevertheless blossomed and thrived. Propped upright in their bags, they furthermore resembled small figures with soil bodies and tendrils for arms. When Escott began filming them, she felt them reaching out to her. The work, she came to understand, was a collaboration with the seeds that she planted, now embodied in the almost interpersonal exchange of nurturing touch. Elaborating on this sociability, she initiated a series of workshops about native plants, compost, and the inherent possibility embedded within a seed– collaborating with Far Out West Community Dune Garden and other organizations – and she captured the interactions of other people with the plants in the series of videos that now line the gallery’s walls.

Hands reach out to touch the plants. Their tendrils reach back. The wind blows, animating the plants with gesture. They enter into dialogue with the movement of the human hands, themselves rich with revealing personality. They exchange caresses – variously cautious, delicate, flirtatious, entangled, and strong. Escott’s video installation works to redress the rupture between humanity and the rest of nature, since the advent of industrial capitalism – what Marx calls the “metabolic rift” – depicting our interdependence with nature instead as a playful reciprocity, a delicate dance full of joy and wonder. The work models an ethics of care in which the agency of the natural world is acknowledged with the personal attention of a lover, a child, a parent, or a friend, i.e., kin; while the audience, like the other participants in the project, are drawn into a project of collective creative inquiry and concern. 

The flowers are beautiful, and the hands are too.  But the piece is not therefore devoid of corruption and loss. The plants remain embroiled in plastic – another feature of our intermingling: nature polluted with our poison and waste. Indeed, as the ecology of the extinct Xerxes butterfly, the installation is riddled with the radical negativity of this absence, highlighting the strife in our relationship with the natural world, while reaching for its antidote in intentional touch. Presenting these living, embodied exchanges through the medium of video, Escott furthermore highlights the ever increasing mediation of our experience of “nature” through screens and technology - seductively distilling, all too neatly, our experience of the complex and entangled world we cohabitate.

Up-Coming Exhibition

ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN
Demagoguery, White Supremacy, and Resistance

Featuring works by:
Nic[o] Brierre Aziz, Christy Chan, Nicólas González-Medina, Doug Hall, and Kal Spelletich

April 19th – June 7th, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 19th, 6:00 – 9:00pm
Closing Reception: Saturday, June 7th, 2:00 – 4:00pm

Events
Nic[o] Brierre Aziz: In-Conversation
Wednesday, April 30th, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Free and open to the public

Art and Politics: A Panel Discussion with Nicólas González-Medina and Kal Spelletich
Wednesday, April 30th, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Free and open to the public

May There Be Light: A Two-Part Workshop on Large Scale Projection Art Presented by Christy Chan
Wednesday, May 14th and Tuesday, May 20th, 6:00 - 8:00pm
Free | Registration limited to eight people

(We strongly encourage participation by BIPOC and LGBTQ folk and political activists)

This is Doug Hall:
A Conversation with Artist Doug Hall about his Recently Published Memoir
Date and time: TBD
Free and open to the public