BmoreArt

Every time I see Jessy DeSantis’ work, it seems like they’ve encapsulated a new piece of the Latino experience I feel connected to. “Return to the Land,” a 48″ x 60″ acrylic painting on canvas, draws parallels between death and rebirth, motherhood and motherland, and honors the connection between our bodies and nature.

The piece is a self portrait of the artist in the fetal position, curled up and sealed within a womb-like vase in an underground setting, like a seed waiting to sprout. “The idea first began when they read about the archeological discovery in Managua, Nicaragua of urns in the shape of wombs,” said Martinez about the piece, shedding light on DeSantis’ cultural references. 

DeSantis’ portrayal of their yearning to reconnect with the land and their cultural heritage is born from their displacement caused by imperialism and capitalism, which is destroying Nicaragua’s landscape and natural resources. “There is a message of reclaiming the land after a conflict,” explains Martinez. “When you go back, there’s this sense of sobering sadness because usually what folks find are destroyed homes, destroyed communities, and poisoned soils. Coming back to the earth requires healing the soil, a literal detoxification, but also bringing back the ancestral and the indigenous roots that were part of that.”

Through “Return to the Land,” de Santis informs us that restoring the ecosystem must go hand in hand with the reintegration of ancient practices. In the age of technology and immediate gratification, our bodies’ ancestral DNA remembers a slower pace of life, one where we are in tune with the Earth’s natural rhythms and cycles, and not against them.

Capitalism’s inherent need for continuous expansion, mass manufacturing, and consumption is the main focus of Taina Litwak’s “The Struggle-Ending our Plastic Addiction.” Despite technically being its own solo installation, “The Struggle” is in conversation with Ecocide.

The multimedia piece evokes childhood memories of playing I Spy, as it is composed of discarded pieces of plastic. Toy cars, paint buckets, Barbie dolls, and so many more items than I can count have been painted grey, stripping them of their initial identity to reflect what they are. They are objects made of crude oil that will eventually break down into microplastics and pollute the oceans, land, our bodies—everything we can see and touch.

It is important to note that almost all objects were previously owned by Litwak, demonstrating just how many things we accumulate over our lifetime. Scheiber shared with me the anecdote that Litwak thrifted the dolls used in the installation shortly after the 2023 release of the Barbie movie, highlighting how quickly something that had been recently released was discarded.

Martinez and Scheiber draw a connection between “The Struggle-Ending our Plastic Addiction” and Ecocide through the curation of the space. McCoy Chance’s “Urban Mining and Discarded Tech” is thoughtfully installed in between “The Struggle” and the rest of the exhibition, anchoring the continuous dialogue in the gallery space. Chance’s “Urban Mining and Discarded Tech” dives into the realities of overconsumption, shining a direct light on the landscapes impacted by technological waste.

The installation is exhibited via a 1988 Toshiba Blackstripe television, a piece of tech that had been discarded and rendered unusable before Chance salvaged it. The visuals themselves are a collection of images and videos of landfills full of E-waste, people tearing apart broken electronics to salvage materials, hundreds of thousands of electronic cables exposed to the elements like vines. “Urban Mining and Discarded Tech” shows us the final stage in these objects’ life cycle, its violent and slow decomposition at the cost of the earth.

If Ecocide brings awareness to events ravaging the world and poses the question of why, “The Struggle-Ending our Plastic Addiction” is the answer. Mindless consumption keeps us pacified, too distracted looking at neon advertisements and shopping hauls to see beyond them. This addiction keeps us from connecting with one another, with community, and by default, the world in all of its entirety.

But the radical optimist in me refuses to accept defeat. I believe in humanity’s capacity to transform the world, to enact new policies that result in good, to make new discoveries that benefit others, to correct injustices, and strive for better for the generations that come after us.

Kei Ito’s “Ravaged Flower of the Future” speaks of hope. It speaks of the future we cling to in the depths of disaster, one that is brighter and better than the past we’ve overcome, in the context of the Hiroshima bombing of 1945. A series of c-print photograms depicting a sunflower, sunlight, and the artist’s breath made with a sunflower grown with the water taken from Fukushima, this piece was made start to finish to honor Ito’s familial history. “His grandfather was a victim of the bombing of Hiroshima.” explained Sheiber. “He started thinking about how that affected his body because radiation [exposure] is present in his DNA ancestry, and about nuclear bombs and nuclear power from a more environmental perspective.”

The Extreme Heat Fellow’s installation is made complete by the bed of blackened sunflower seeds laid out in a perfect rectangle on a platform, each seed a call to action and hope rallied by Ito. “I wonder if in the near future, a scientist will create a sunflower that can consume the radioactive material and can live off the radiation.” wrote Ito, “And if so, it is only natural to think that the post nuclear apocalyptic world will be covered with sunflowers for the next few hundred years.”

The thing about hope is that it can bloom anywhere. Even in the most dire of circumstances, even where it seems most unlikely, it will grow if it takes root. This is true for “Ahmed’s Farm,” a gouache and watercolor painting by Taylor Smith-Hams. In this piece, Smith-Hams shares with us the story of Ahmed Aaed, “an 8-year-old child, who has been growing, relocating, and tending to a small farm to feed his family throughout the genocide in Gaza.”

The landscape depicts beautiful greenery growing amongst the rubble and destruction, a garland of Palestinian flags framing the tended oasis. In the midst of war, a young child is fighting for survival with the few resources he has available in order to nurture himself and his loved ones. In this piece, I see echoes of Martinez’s earlier thoughts of reclaiming the land after conflict. Ahmed’s resilience not only nurtures him, but also the land, a land he and his ancestors belong to.

Every piece of artwork in Ecocide feels intimately connected to one another. They tell stories who share the same core, each one happening millions of miles from one another and spanning across decades. We live in times where the earth is being ravaged like never before—nuclear warfare, oil spills, harmful materials in landfills—these are all factors adding up into a never ending equation that ultimately results in the death of the only home humanity has ever known.

I invite you to visit Crow’s Nest and view Ecocide. Let the artwork speak for itself and let it impact your heart as deeply as it impacted mine. I left not feeling defeated, but revitalized. I may only be one voice, but I hope it reaches you and pushes you to do what you can to protect the land and the communities that inhabit it. 

Crow’s Nest is hosting an Earth Day event, where the artists will have an informal artist talk and representatives from Baltimore Artists Against Apartheid will host a free screen printing workshop. Come with open hearts and your own garments to participate.