DITCHIN’: Hay & High Ground

A collaboration by Heather McMordie & Edward Landa

Exhibition/Talk at Cultivate Studios

4218 Howard Avenue, Kensington, Maryland

May 10, 7 - 9 PM Opening

May 11, 12 - 4 PM

May 19, 2 PM Presentation/Talk, RSVP

May 12 – 18, By appointment, cultivate@cultivateprojects.net

DITCHIN’: Hay & High Ground is a print and projection installation developed by artist and printmaker Heather McMordie and soil scientist and environmental historian Edward Landa. The project examines the long-term impacts (physical and cultural) of early 20th-century mosquito control ditches on the coastal wetlands of the Northeastern United States. Viewers are invited to physically and metaphorically step through miasmic layers of information in this multi-media installation of real and imagined landscapes.

Heather McMordie and Edward Landa have been collaboratively creating since Summer 2022. Their shared interest in salt marsh ecosystems has provided them with fertile ground for creative exploration.

This exhibition is made possible in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

About the Artists:

Heather McMordie is an artist, educator, and curator based in Providence, RI. Her work explores the complexities of soil science and environmental restoration through prints, puzzles, artist books, and interactive installations. She is especially interested in the ways in which experiences with art objects can mirror field research experiences and create opportunities for tacit learning. More information about Heather’s work can be found at www.heathermcmordie.com

Edward Landa is a soil scientist and Adjunct Professor, Department of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Maryland. His research has explored the effects of contaminants in terrestrial and aquatic environments (from nuclear waste sites to mosquito breeding grounds), and the interface between soil science and the arts. He is currently focused on the complex history and impacts of ditching salt marshes for mosquito control. More information about Ed’s work can be found at https://agnr.umd.edu/about/directory/edward-landa

Elena Soterakis

Intertwining Roots: BioArt and the Environmental Nexus 

March 26, 2024, Zoom

Join us for a talk and discussion with Elena Soterakis titled "Intertwining Roots: BioArt and the Environmental Nexus." Set against the backdrop of the pioneering exhibition she co-curated at BioBAT Art Space, "Embodied Futures and The Ecology of Care,” Soterakis aims to peel back the layers of traditional environmentalism, exploring the symbiotic relationship between art, biology, technology, and ethics. Through the lens of BioArt, she delves into how this innovative field not only challenges our perceptions of life and interconnectedness, but also acts as a catalyst for redefining the essence of care in our modern world as transcendent of human-centric frameworks

Cultivate: Without Title

Cultivate Studios, 4218 Howard Avenue, Kensington, MD 20855

Location: Ken-Gar Tributaries → Lower Rock Creek → Potomac River Watershed

Saturday, March 18: opening 7 - 9 PM

Sunday, March 26: closing 2 – 4 PM

By appointment March 19 – 25 please contact: cultivate@cultivateprojects.net

Kensington, MD - CULTIVATE, an evolving collection of artists, writers, and researchers investigating land, place, and the commons , presents its first exhibition March 18 - 26 at the Cultivate Studio location in Kensington, Maryland. The group exhibition, featuring current Cultivators, poses two questions: How do we individually and collectively cultivate? How do we approach landscape and relations with land?____________________________________

Without Title suggests the potential of working without a singular designation and beyond boundaries of ownership. The exhibition offers a glimpse of varied practices that explore the qualities, perceptions, contexts, and systems that inform and expand notions of landscape.

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Featured artists include: Anitra Accetturo, Inga Adda, Sobia Ahmad, Mei Mei Chang, Maggie Gourlay, Katie Kehoe, Madeleine Keller, Susan Main, Jonna McKone, Meeting Ground (MJ Neuberger and Susan Main), Murat Cem Mengüç, Hugh Pocock, Elzbieta Sikorska, Lynn Silverman, Gabriel Soto, Olivia Weise, Sue Wrbican, and Judit Varga.

Without Title- Exhibition Information

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Cultivate screening!

Leah Clare Michaels – I Love Women Who Shame The Family

Mat Keel/Liz Lessner (Yes We Cannibal) – Secretion: A New Translation of the Sublime

February 25, 7 PM EST at Cultivate Studios (4218 Howard Avenue, Kensington, MD)

RSVP early, limited seating

Join us for a screening of films by artists Leah Clare Michaels and Mat Keel/Liz Lessner (collaborative duo Yes We Cannibal). Their films explore the land as a primary connective force linking personal and cultural histories and the materiality of place. All artists spent time in the Monte Amiata region of southern Tuscany during their stays at Cultivate’s La Baldi Residency in Montegiovi, Italy.

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Secretion: A New Translation of the Sublime (2023)

Mat Keel and Liz Lessner

La Baldi Resident awardees Mat Keel and Liz Lessner’s film Secretion: A New Translation of the Sublimeproposes an enigmatic love story where secrets and secretions travel into and out of bodies and systems, defy translation, and escape fixed states.

“The sublime is, at once, both the recognition of an excessive and overdetermined cosmos as well as the revelation of the individual’s self-awareness. It is the foundational survey system upon which the white West is mapped and then built, an etheric but concrete veil stultifying other lifeways, lovers, and topos. It is domination masquerading as mystery.

In the summer of 2022, we went to Italy in search of this miraculous revelation, seeking origin in the Roman agricultural system, seeking fissures in the elements, and fell in love twice.

First with an earth-being named Amiata who existed in name only, without form; second with a Helicidae, who existed without name, only form.

We bestowed a name on this second lover and fed him/her well; Bruce Nauman, we called him/her, an homage to the admired artist on whom we were already ruminating: does the true artist still reveal mystic truths in the Financialocene, Bruce? Does this help the world? Or might we revivify secrecy? Secretion.

This question lends a structure to our film which presents the viewer not with what we were shown and will not share, but only offers tactics for how to ensure it remains hidden and strategies of intentionally obfuscating translation.” – Mat Keel and Liz Lessner

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I Love Women Who Shame The Family

Leah Clare Michaels

 Leah Clare Michaels shares an excerpt from I Love Women Who Shame The Family, an experimental documentary essay film that examines the artist's ancestry. Shot on 8mm film and exposed with natural, non-chemical fixers made from native Italian herbs, flowers, wine and coffee, the film is a work- in-progress that includes color and black and white imagery of ancestral grottos in Pertosa, Italy, found footage from Italian archives in Rome and Bologna, stories, family interviews, and sound from ancestral grottos in Pertosa, Italy. Michaels will discuss the evolution of the film, its making and processing, and experimental documentation of history, family, and place.

Nate Larson

Site-Responsive Portraits of Community

January 24

Join us for an artist talk and conversation with contemporary artist and documentarian Nate Larson.

Larson will talk about his work creating site-responsive portraits of community working with photographic media, artist books and time-based media.

Drawing on the context of his past work, Larson will also share images and reflections about a recent community portrait project started during his La Baldi Residency in the small village of Montegiovi, Italy.

Hugh Pocock

No Man’s Land

February 22

Join us for a conversation with Hugh Pocock who will talk about his current project No Man’s Land — a park for the non-human, his interest in the global movement of the Rights of Nature, and how land can be recognized as having "legal personhood".

Sensingsite

January 23

CULTIVATE is pleased to present a conversation with members of Sensingsite on Sunday, January 23 at 12 PM EST. Sensingsite is an art practice-based research collective developing arts-based responses to the political, material, and sensory natures of site, place, and space.

Edgar Reyes

They Tried to Bury Us, They Didn’t Know We Were Seeds

November 30

Join us for a guided discussion led by Baltimore- based Mexican American artist Edgar Reyes on the power and knowledge that can be shared through plants. Reyes shares how indigenous plants, food, and language have influenced his practice. He analyzes the distinct ways in which myths and colonial perspectives have created hybrid traditions and beliefs. 

Mat Keel:
Triggering the Plantation Unconscious

October 19

Through archival research, experimental media practices and sited interviews with foragers in urban forests along the Gulf Coast, Mat Keel traces connections between plantation afterlives and contemporary ecological relationships. His research is grounded in contemporary theories of trauma to explore how divergent racialized ecological subjectivities are assembled through layered disruptions to nature, time and space resulting from plantation form, dispossession and historical changes to labor and landscape.

Jonathan Monaghan

Unworld: Landscapes of the New Romanticism

September 28

Join us for a conversation with Jonathan Monaghan who explores the tension and potential of the digital landscape. Jonathan shares his own work and other artists who are increasingly using digital technology to send their viewers into unique, imaginative and fantastical landscapes. Is this reaction a type of Romanticism? How are these “New Romantics” raising critical awareness, shaping culture and identity within digital environments? What does a frontier offer where artists have more to say, more ways to say it, and easier ways to connect to audience?

Inga Adda: Walk This Way

August 10 

In a time of anxiety and unrest, Walk This Way serves as a safe, grounding space, free to the public, and a social-distancing-friendly art experience. Through playful humor and a lighthearted approach, the posted prompts and questions widen the scope of our daily lives through an active interaction with nature and introduce a new perspective of our place within it.

Kavita Gonsalves:
Radical Placemaking

July 13

Join us in a conversation with Kavita Gonsalves covering her work on radical placemaking using a combination of storytelling, technology and place to engage local communities in creative placemaking. In this session, she will discuss the Chatty Bench Project & TransHuman Saunter.

Conversations:
Observing A Year

April 1

We live in a world built from a web of complex relationships and multiple intelligences. We are not at its center but a part of an inconceivable greater whole. Join and share how you participate in this web of interdependence and contribute your practices to help us build a More Than Human World library.

Meeting Ground

Sound + Ground

March 25

Happy Spring! Just like the roots of plants we see budding, we’ve been underground but are reaching out as the sun crosses the equator and inviting you to join #meeting_ground for Sound + Ground.