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.

Recent Artist Talk

David Bayus: In-Conversation

with Clark Buckner

Reflecting on his current exhibition, Performance Anxiety, and its playful personal treatment of insecurity, anger, generational changes in romantic relationships, and contemporary uncertainties about the role of men in a post-feminist world.

WATCH THE VIDEO: HERE!