Seeds of Change

Art exhibit at the Roundhouse invites a conversation about our use, and abuse, of the land

For many years, Bobbe Besold has photographed the hands of farmers, often those she met at the Santa Fe Farmers Market, in or near their stands of produce and between customers, their fingers draped over carrots or cupping pints of berries. Then she was asked by the director of Española Farmers Market to participate in a project that sent her out to the fields of a family-run farm near Tesuque, pulling carrots, helping to open the acequia and interviewing the family. The work cut to a much deeper level, to conversations about the land we live in, the land that made us, the land that feeds us, and how we cultivate a life for ourselves without destroying sources of food and life for those who follow us.

Besold realized other artists were similarly engaging with these issues and decided to curate a show, The Ecozoic Era: plant|seed|soil, that focuses not on that food chain of what eats what, but where that what begins—in plants, in seeds, in soil—and to cultivate a conversation about how we are shaped by, and have begun to reshape, the planet around us.

"Visual art is a catalyst in a way that other things are not," Besold says. "We can read a lot of facts about what we should be doing, and why we should be doing it, but when you actually are seeing images and absorbing ideas in that way, it's a whole other avenue into the human mind."

The exhibition, featuring roughly 20 artists, explores the interactions of people, climate and carbon, and it does so at the State Capitol building.

"I like to work in unusual places," Besold says, "because people come to the place without expecting to see something that might change them."

Based on the number of annual visitors to the Roundhouse, some 20,000 people could pass by this exhibition, which opened April 29 and has a reception on May 6.

"I'm expecting [visitors] to think about what their responsibility is to everything, to all other beings," she says. Perhaps, she says, seeds will be planted in the minds of some of those lawmakers on the fourth floor.

She chose the term "ecozoic" as a counter to the now increasingly common "anthropocene." In the latter, she says, she doesn't see enough accountability for what we do and have done. But "ecozoic" ties together the Greek roots for "house" and "living beings"—there's an accountability implied, like in any home, that the residents will each take a share in the chores required to keep the household running, like washing the dishes and doing the yard work.

"It is a seed planting in people's heads," Besold says of Ecozoic. "Some of them may not grow for a while, but some may sprout right away—where do we get our food, and what could we do with our yard? If it makes people talk about our relationship to everything, to planet earth, that's a really important piece."

The opening reception will include a seed exchange hosted by SeedBroadcast, demonstrations and information on composting from Reunity Resources, and an interactive weaving of an olla, a native water-storage vessel, that started with a University of New Mexico class on art and the American West that took college students out into the landscape to prompt projects about the environment. While visiting the Gila Wilderness, the students heard about a proposal to dam the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico.

"To think about where exactly they want to put the dam, it would just disrupt that entire ecosystem, and that place we had lunch at would never be there again," says Sarah Molina, a UNM senior fine arts major who attended the class. "Just coming in as artists that connect with the earth, it really affected us a lot."

They harvested willow branches along the riverbank and created a four-foot basket that was then placed back into the Gila River. But they wanted to bring that piece and that conversation back to Albuquerque, recounts Molina. And that's also how the project landed in Santa Fe for the Ecozoic opening.

"An olla is used to capture water, but this olla is a woven basket, so of course it's not going to hold water," she says. "A dam is going to capture water, but it's not going to hold the water forever. It's just kind of an obstruction in the way of the natural flow."

People will be invited to weave a willow into the olla and to consider the prospect of damming the last predominantly undammed river in the state.

The standing exhibit features artwork that invites a closer look at the elements of plants and seeds—bundles of leaves, made by Santa Fean artist Matthew Chase-Daniel, that see oak leaves folding in on one another and cottonwood leaves packed so their stems make a tiny forest, or spun and pinned together. Nancy Sutor photographs the miraculous beauty of a compost pile turning persimmons and apple cores into soil, instead of festering in a landfill where they would release methane. Ahni Rocheleau intercedes on behalf of New Mexico's communities affected by oil and gas development and coal-fired power plants with an installation of Department of Defense drinking water canisters and tumbleweeds below a banner that declares, "I am not a sacrifice zone." Albuquerque-based Jade Leyva's paintings make sweet statements about the intertwining of human spirits and their natural surroundings. Basia Irland's photographs show her "ice books," blocks of ice carved into the shape of books, the pages of which are covered with seeds from native riparian plants. The books are then placed in a river, where they melt and disperse their contents, fueling restoration of the river ecosystem in which plants provide habitat, filter pollutants and reduce flooding.

"Each of us is a walking river held together by paper-thin skin," Irland said in a 2015 TEDx talk in Vail, Colo. "We are water, we are blood, we are tears, and we are urine. We are all connected. We are not separate from the waters of the world."

The Ecozoic Era: Plant|Seed|Soil
State Capitol Building,
411 S Capitol St. Through Aug. 5
Opening reception 4-6 pm Friday, May 6

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