The Death of a Naturalist
Solo exhibition @ The Rest gallery. Ithaca, New York.
Our bodies exist in intricate relationships with other forms of life, from microorganisms and fungi to plants and other animals. We are also surrounded by settings and objects in which different scales of time–geological, microbial, and human converge. How can we understand ourselves in these complex networks of life and kinship? In The Death of a Naturalist, artist Maro Pebo explores these entanglements and invites us to question traditional notions of classification, taxonomy, and species individuality. Pebo’s work delves into the politics of microbial life, exploring the hierarchies and biopolitical distribution of pain, death, aversion, and mutualism among different species. The title of the exhibition is a nod to Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s “Death of a Naturalist,” a coming-of-age literary piece describing a child’s wondrous encounters with the natural world. Through sculptures, installations found organisms and microscopic photos. The exhibition presents a post-anthropocentric view of life that aims at revealing the interconnectedness and symbiotic relationships between bacteria, plants, and humans.
Curated by Rodrigo Guzmán and Camaron Cohen.
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