Eco/Systems Group Exhibition

The Gallery is open Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays between 2-6pm.

Eco/Systems features artwork from fifteen artists and collectives considering their relationship to place, as it’s lived upon, and climate, as it’s felt: Technologies that hack common industrial objects toward sustainable use. Videos that travel the changing landscape of globalized capital, and attend to non-human animals in their role as (art-)historical colonial signifiers. Sculptures that dream about their weightlessness and formfulness. Games and rituals that make space for somatic connection and healing. Printed matter that traces community work and offers shape to liberatory futures.

How do we contend with climate disaster from within these ecosystems, from a context of lush personal history and material study? From the contrast between living on hyper-developed settler colonial land, and the slow process of orienting towards care? What is transmuted may look like this, here.

May the range of medium, approach, and tenor in this exhibition give way to our own diverse approaches for being in relationship with the land, the sky, the sea, and with each other. Let us consider alternate understandings of strangeness, of usefulness, of abundance.

Curated by Heidi Ratanavanich and Connie Yu
Installation support by Hannah Declercq
Equipment support provided by Television

Funding for this exhibition was provided in part by The Mellon Foundation & The Ford Foundation

About the Curators
Heidi Ratanavanich is a part-time artist and a full-time friend. Heidi is interested in the intersection of food sovereignty, Thai/Chinese diaspora, ecology and economy. She joined the Truelove Seeds squad in 2020 as an apprentice, and is involved in Television, which provides low cost technology rentals to independent curators, activists and organizers in Philadelphia. They are also part of a team that is re-opening a small takeout corner store in West Philly called Golden Dragon. 

Connie Yu practices writing, printing, and cooking, which feel most energetic when collaborative. They work in manners of production, print, and public gathering, toward means of responsive and collective learning. So far, this has meant curating, editing, and publishing work by and for queer Asian artists and writers; facilitating art practices of folks with limited access to education; working on the sidelines of multidisciplinary productions in Philadelphia to tune skills, build resources, and share joy. 

Together, with Andrienne Palchick, they are a co-founders/editors/otherwise tenders of the publication project FORTUNE, and its small-scale risograph imprint Many Folds Press.