Catalyst Contemporary presents “Lifecycles – Mind/Body”, a duo, multi-media exhibition featuring new works by Se Jong Cho and Bonnie Crawford. The collection of paintings, sculptures, and photographs converge to prompt a conversation on nature, reproductive rights, and the connections between body and mind.

In our current socio-political climate where previously protected rights of reproductive autonomy are now unstable and disappearing, Cho’s surreal paintings prompt conversation on the body’s biological processes. With deep, red droplets in O’Keefe-like landscapes, Cho’s twelve newest acrylic paintings follow her menstrual cycle for a year starting in early 2020. With opulent backgrounds of mesas, mountains, clouds, and a new motif of a checkerboard-like object, her paintings celebrate the monthly renewal of the sacred womb of life, drawing on O’Keefe’s language of the majesty of Southwestern vistas. Concurrently, Crawford’s “collaborations with worms” sculptures — sculptures made by combining ceramics with materials that have been altered by larvae —  is a body of work that addresses birth, reproduction, and death as natural processes of any biological organism.

Cho’s watercolors and Crawford’s photographs in the backroom gallery ruminate on the current Western social and linguistic dichotomies such as male|female, nature/human, and art/science. “Lifecycles–Mind/Body” brings together art, science, and education to address reproductive rights and larger conversations on gender and identity.

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Se Jong Cho began painting while pursuing her Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering. Her training as a scientist taught her to become observant and think critically, and she cultivated her brand of creative expression that combines multidisciplinary perspectives.

Bonnie Crawford makes sculptures, drawings, and photographs while considering how caretaking occurs in relation to and in spite of capitalism’s devaluation of reproductive labor.

Se Jong Cho & Bonnie Crawford

April 18th – May 27th, 2023