Reclamation

Reclamation: Recovering Our Relationship with Place

Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Colorado State University

1400 Remington Street, Fort Collins, CO 80523

July 7-September 19, 2021

September 9, 9:00-11:00 p.m.: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens will screen their film Water Makes Us Wet at The Lyric Cinema at 1209 N. College Avenue in Fort Collins.

September 10, 4:00-5:30 p.m.: Sprinkle and Stephens will lead an “EcoSex Walking Tour” of the Cache La Poudre River at Whitewater Park (starting at the Powerhouse Energy Campus at 430 N. College Avenue in Fort Collins).

Review by Emily Zeek

Every year during Pride month, a debate erupts about who should and shouldn’t be able to participate. Should cops be allowed? What about straight people? Or corporations? This question of exclusion at an intentionally inclusive event can be confusing. However, cops, corporations, and straight people share one thing in common: a history or aesthetic of domination. When it comes to celebrating love, it’s what these specific expressions represent—exploitation—that is problematic and harmful. 

In the same way Pride has become a global phenomenon, the curators of the expansive exhibition Extraction: On the Edge of the Abyss have set the ambitious goal of manifesting a worldwide “ruckus” around confronting climate change, in particular extractive and exploitative processes. [1] One aspect of this undertaking entails bringing their artistic movement to the state of Colorado via the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art in Fort Collins. The movement was founded by writer Edwin Dobb and artists Sam Pelts and Peter Rutledge Koch, whose own personal history in Montana surrounded by the dominance of the Anaconda Copper Company provided the initial inspiration for the project as a whole.

A view of Reclamation: Recovering Our Relationship with Place at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art featuring Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Muscle, Bone & Sinew from Future Ancestral Technologies, 2021, regalia on mannequins, with the corresponding with digital video Shadow holding shape to experience the energy of the sun (working title). Image by DARIA.

As part of this movement, curator Erika Osborne presents six artists in an exhibit entitled Reclamation: Recovering Our Relationship with Place at the Gregory Allicar Museum alongside dozens of other curators, artists, writers, poets, and activists across the globe. The full extent of the collaboration is documented in the catalog and exhibition guide for Extraction featured on their website—excavationart.org—and in print on recycled newsprint.

The cover image for Extraction: Catalog and Exhibition Guide. Image from extractionart.org.

Reclamation features an eclectic blend of artistic expressions, ranging from the more stoic Anthropocene works of Cedra Wood and John Sabraw, to cheeky and ironic pieces by Matt Kenyon and former porn star turned performance artist Annie Sprinkle and her partner Beth Stephens. Everyone has a different relationship with the planet and we express our affection in different ways. In the spirit of inclusion, curators Osborne and Boland have created a visual translation of the love languages we speak with planet earth.

Cedra Wood, Plot (Kluane), 2018, graphite on paper, 45 x 45 inches. Image courtesy of the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art.

For those who revel in the hyper-realistic, Cedra Wood delivers using the medium of scientific drawing to create elaborate and detailed illustrations of the arctic tundra. Creating subtle but poignant commentary on the cultures that grow beneath our feet, the humble, to-scale pencil and paper drawings speak to biodiversity through a stark and stoic lens. Wood, who embodies the global ethos of the show, lives a transitory nomadic lifestyle that imbues her work with empathy for this ecosystem.

Cannupa Hanska Luger, Muscle, Bone & Sinew, from Future Ancestral Technologies, 2021, a film still by cinematographer Lucas Mullikan. Image courtesy of the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art.

The visionary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger uses “Indigenous-centered science fiction” and “creative storytelling to radically reimagine the future.” [2] He combines traditional ceremonial regalia with industrial motorcycle jackets, creating a hybrid identity for fashions that represent his interconnected lineage of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European, specifically Norwegian descent. His work in fiber arts is paired with imagery of the landscape, making a connection to place that is integral to indigenous knowing. “Our relationship to place is not of possession,” he explains, “it does not belong to me, I belong to it.” [3]

A detail view of one part of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Muscle, Bone & Sinew from Future Ancestral Technologies, 2021, regalia on mannequins. Image by DARIA.

When it comes to possessing the planet—at least in the United States—the possessors have tended to be men of white European descent, which makes the white male founding fathers of this movement, Dobb (who is now deceased), Pelts, and Koch, seem somewhat suspect. In the same way one might be skeptical of straight people, corporations, or cops at Pride, I find myself skeptical of white men questioning a system from which they benefit so profoundly.  

In the exhibition catalogue, however, they expound upon their personal philosophies, sharing a quote from the late Howard Zinn (another white male benefactor of the system). “The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel … the new fact of our era is the chance that they might be joined by the guards.  We readers and writers of books have been, for the most part, among the guards.” [4] So the cops at Pride are at least aware of the fact that they are cops? Should we be satisfied by self-awareness as a stand in for progress? Although these men may eschew the title of founder, preferring instead an aesthetic of global collaboration, these introductions in the catalogue provide fine resting places for their egos.

In their own words, these men “bear witness” to the crimes of humanity and mining violence taking place in service of a system of capitalism. But the detached observer ethos harkens back to the realists of the 20th century—artists who sought to bear witness to the harsh realities of the working class while still maintaining a distance from the struggle. But some contemporary artists are emboldened to take their roles one step further when they witness the injustice: to put down the paintbrush and intervene.

Mary Mattinglym Remediating El Cerrejon, 2020, chromogenic dye coupler print, 52 × 14 inches. Image courtesy of the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art.

In this spirit, artist Mary Mattingly founded Swale, an edible landscape on a barge in New York City. “Docked at public piers but following waterways common laws, Swale circumnavigates New York’s public land laws, allowing anyone to pick free fresh food.” [5] Mattingly intercepts the artistic ethos of observation and detachment in a direct, visceral, and nutritional manner, allowing food to become her medium. In the Reclamation exhibit, Mattingly collects soil samples and displays them aesthetically, creating a synthesis between ecology and artistry.

John Sabraw, From Pollution to Paint poster showing the process of turning acid mine drainage to paint and the remediation of polluted streams in southeast Ohio. Image from the artist’s website.

For John Sabraw this intervention takes the form of remediation. Sabraw works with a “team of engineers and watershed experts to remediate streams polluted by acid mine drainage from abandoned coal mines.” [6] He harvests iron oxide pigments from the contaminated Ohio River region, turning them into paint and then using them for his art. This disruption speaks to the recovery aspect of the Allicar show by taking the stressed, overworked, and polluted environment and clearing it of Anthropocene toxins.

In keeping with the global themes of the show, Sabraw’s round planetary creations contrast the hyper-scientific process with minimalist fluid works. The aestheticization of the Anthropocene pollution quietly erodes the shock value of extractive processes, however. The temptation to passively glorify pollution and toxic waste through art can be counterproductive to goals of ending it. But for now, bringing attention to these harmful industrial processes seems to be the logical step in a system of capitalist denial.

Matt Kenyon, Supermajor, 2014, vintage oil cans, metal rack, oil, tubing, pump, and platform. Image taken at the exhibition (IN)HABITATION, curated by Greg Tom at Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (MOCAD).

Meanwhile artist Matt Kenyon uses projection and optical illusion to simulate a process of reversing time and pollution. His work Super Major uses water that simulates oil returning to vintage oil cans. The issues posed by this evocative artwork bring up existential questions of entropy, time, and our role within the universe as well as our impact upon it. Kenyon’s post-modern use of appropriation and branding plays on the way domination is spread by artistic processes. The primary colors red, yellow, and blue make the sinister companies feel normal, acceptable, and safe to our aesthetic susceptibilities.

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Performance Ephemera, including their Ecosex Manifesto designed by Hoshi Hanna. Top image by DARIA and bottom image from the artists’ website.

Art that takes on climate change and heady topics based in scientific jargon tends to be a bit cold, aloof, and detached. But by explicitly calling into question viewers’ and artists’ “relationship with place” (as the exhibition subtitle states), the curators of Reclamation have given a warm treatment to otherwise cold and sterile subject matter. The inclusion of Annie Sprinkle who was a “pivotal player in the 1980’s sex positive feminist movement” [7] and her partner Beth Stephens, who together call themselves “eco-sexual,” plays into an almost Oedipal conclusion to the show: Mother Earth as sex goddess.

A still from Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’ film Water Makes Us Wet, 2021. Image from the artists’ website.

As we explore our budding relationship with Mother Earth, with Sprinkle and Stephens as our guides, we are awakened to the inherent sexual connection and attraction we have to the planet that formed us. As such, our defense of the planet is rooted in a great deal of love, admiration, and intrigue. To further their guidance, on September 9, Sprinkle and Stephens will be screening their film Water Makes Us Wet for the public and on Friday, September 10 they will be leading an “EcoSex Walking Tour” of the Cache La Poudre River with performances that will no doubt introduce spectators to their lust for the planet.

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Healing Use, photograph courtesy of Naomi MTR.

Just as contemporary sex positive movements like Pride grapple with inclusion, we struggle in our relationship with place and specifically the place we call home—planet earth—in how to love without dominating. That is, in how to appreciate something without appropriating and exploiting it, and how to appreciate and have pride for the variety of expressions of love that exist as well as receive various love languages. But putting boundaries up against the destructive and questionable behaviors and instincts of human beings leaves room for genuine affection and love. And maybe even some great sex too.

Curator Erika Osborne holds up the Eco Sexual Pride Flag developed by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens at an in progress preview event for Reclamation: Recovering Our Relationship with Place. Image by Emily Zeek.

Although Reclamation opened in July, the curators gave an in-progress preview at the beginning of the summer that I attended. In a lot of ways, this particular budding environmental movement feels a bit in progress—there is still much work to be done. And the many disparate artistic identities, while inclusive, make the show and larger body of work, Extraction, feel not yet synthesized. Rather than a coherent artistic and aesthetic identity, the works feel pulled from different genres. As the eco-sexual environmental movement continues to develop and grow, my hope is that it births a new artistic movement—one distinct from the parental figure of capitalism that formed it.

Emily Zeek is a transmedia and social practice artist from Littleton, Colorado who works with themes of feminism, sustainability, and anti-capitalism. She has a BFA in Transmedia Sculpture from the University of Colorado Denver and a BS in Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines.



[1] Quoted from https://www.extractionart.org/home.

[2] From http://www.cannupahanska.com/.

[3] From the Grist 50 video The Artist Fusing Science Fiction and Native Ideas, accessed via http://www.cannupahanska.com/.

[4] From the Preface for the exhibition catalogue available as a pdf here: https://www.extractionart.org/megazine.

[5] From https://marymattingly.com/html/MATTINGLYSwale.html.

[6] From https://www.johnsabraw.com/.

[7] From https://theecosexuals.ucsc.edu/.