For over 10 years Mapping Meaning has brought together artists, scientists and scholars to explore new modes of acting in the face of social and ecological emergency. This wildly interdisciplinary and multi-generational collective supports the creative work and scholarship of those pushing disciplinary boundaries.     

Inspired by a photograph from 1918 depicting an all-female survey crew, the project encompasses experimental workshops, exhibitions and transdisciplinary research. To date there have been six workshops held at field stations in the USAmerican West.  These interactive and field-based gatherings flourish at the intersections of art, science, and imagination and have featured time traveling pre-apocalyptic performances, storytelling walks, the study of edges and desert ecotones, the mapping of ant homes, reimagined sculptural leveling rods, emergent and site-responsive voice, song, poetry and breath cameras to name just a few. Over the past 2 years Mapping Meaninghas also generated 4 issues of an interdisciplinary journal with our most recent focused on “Life after the Anthropocene.”

This exhibition, Encounters and Entanglements: The Art of Mapping Meaning, features artwork from those within the collective to highlight ways experimental, process-driven methods as well as interdisciplinary and collaborative practices offer up avenues for agency and transformation: plants become sculpture and image; participatory performance doubles as community action; family history uncovers environmental legacy; birds communicate the future; poetry speaks new forms into being; and collaborative processes make and unmake worlds. Utilizing divergent approaches and a diversity of media, each artist or collaborative project examines the messy and complicated yet lively and beautiful encounters between people and more-than-human worlds. Together they reveal ways that our ecological condition is directly entangled with how we see ourselves as individuals and how as individuals we live in relationship with each other.

For more information, including opening events, please visit the Kohl Gallery.

Participating Artists:

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

Krista Caballero

Birding the Future (Krista Caballero & Frank Ekeberg)

Sarah Kanouse

Sharon Mansur

Rosalind Murray

Megan Singleton

Trudi Lynn Smith

Sylvia Torti

Toni Wynn

Live performances by Karina Aguilera Skvirsky and Rosalind Murray

Panel Discussion:

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

Krista Caballero

Carmina Sánchez-del-Valle

Toni Wynn