Sun Eaters w/ Grace Grothaus
IDEAS online performance
Thursday, May 27, 2021
Host: Shahrokh Yadegari, Brett Stalbaum
5:00-7:00pm PST

Agenda
5:00 Introductions
5:15 Performance
6:00 Discussion Q&A

Tune in live at 5:00pm: https://youtu.be/IqhqiDaufsc

IDEAS website: IDEAS.ucsd.edu

Description

Sun Eaters is a series of sculptures that sense the invisible bioelectric waves present in all living beings and translate it into visible light for us to see. Plant blindness, a form of cognitive bias, is a common tendency to overlook plants and to treat them solely as a beautiful backdrop in front of which human action takes place. Yet plants, trees in particular, sequester atmospheric carbon. Trees are vital to the health of our future and worthy of our increased attention. Therefore, for much the same reasons that some stop signs and warning notices are outfitted with blinking LEDs, I've illuminated these trees with the same: to arrest your attention within our over-saturated world. I believe that artworks' role in environmental efforts is as visual aids in comprehension through expansion of our imagination, and that they can provide an empirical interface for grasping both ecological processes and ways of thinking about them. I hope that Sun Eaters serves in this manner and ultimately their viewing encourages a moment of reflection regarding our complex, interwoven, beyond-human ecologies of present-day Earth. 

Artist Bio

Grace Grothaus is a transdisciplinary artist interested in generating space for future-facing reflection regarding human agency enacted through the constructed world. Through her research-driven installations, sculptures, photographs, videos and performances, she explores the complex web of ideas relating to the pressing ecological crisis of biodiversity loss resulting from climate change. She hopes to address questions such as how can we reshape our relationships with each other and collectively awaken to a role of intra and inter-species respect, mutualism, and stewardship?

Grothaus interrogates both the troubled present through projects such as The Promise of Progress and Against our Better Nature, and speculative futures with projects such as Rise, Symbiocities and Sunlit. Previously her artworks were among those representing the United States in the 2012 World Creativity Biennale and have been exhibited and/or collected nationwide and abroad on five continents. She was a National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts Merit Award winner and has received an Art365 Fellowship. Her art has been featured on the cover of Art Focus magazine and This Land Press. She is currently pursuing an MFA from UC San Diego and resides in La Jolla, California with her dog and many plants.