B. Greiner
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New Ecologies grew out of a reexamining of my relationships; the relationship with self, the cultural context of living in in 21st century American capitalism, and the relationship of my biological being with the system of living organisms and technological frameworks that surround us. Gifted with a propensity for melancholic introspection, I entered graduate school in 2019 expecting to reconnect with my creative practice and to further explore and investigate the motivations and complexities of my work. Within the space of a year the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted norms of living on a societal scale, brining with it (amongst many things) the concepts of the “essential worker”, the digitization of interpersonal communication, and apocryphal tales of dolphins being seen in the once polluted Venice canals. The combination of a forced retreat, an institutional framework for introspection, and isolation created the perfect environment in which to examine the workings of society and how I moved through it. New Ecologies is meant to explore the resonances between the personal, societal, technological and ecological and how they are all omnipresent and interconnected in the living of my day to day life.
The show is also a proposal for exploring these relationships with new methodologies and questioning the established conventional viewpoints around concepts such as “nature”, “business”, “technology”, and “self”. At present these concepts, as developed within American cultural frameworks of dualistic reductionist thinking and zero sum industrial capitalism, no longer serve the present crises of economic disparity, cultural and class warfare, ecological collapse and a technological enclosing of the commons. Instead of being disparate elements, these ideological concepts rapidly interface with one another though a complex web of interactions and as such are becoming vying ideological organisms in the modern cultural ecosystem. In critiquing a complex world, I have tried to develop methods of abstract inquiry based around ecological perspectives of interconnectedness. The show and the individual works within it function as a microcosm for exploring these intricate relationships and the functionality of the the modern cultural ecosystem on a scale more localized and focused on human sense perception.