Feeding the Unseen: Remediations of Earth
Group exhibition curated by Heidi Gustafson and Devon Deimler
On View: June 3-July 30, 2023

Treasure Vase (2023), Treasure of Abundance | Film still from Reconnect (2022), by Māori artist Sarah Hudson

---

The Philosophical Research Society is pleased to present a group exhibition co-curated by Heidi Gustafson and Devon Deimler titled Feeding the Unseen: Remediations of Earth.

Spiritually-charged rocks, soil, metal, and pigment. Intimate acts of alchemy. Renewed cultural practices. Remediations of earth with earth. Elemental magic. The artists of Feeding the Unseen critically engage the metamorphic gravity of living on a mortal planet.

Viewers are invited to witness and absorb artworks that transmute and transform lost, traumatized, or toxic matters: a hermetically sealed weapon slowly dissolving into black ink by alchemists Thomas Little and Dylan Kehde Roelofs; a film of Māori artist Sarah Hudson as she becomes “rocks in all forms”; a sacred drawing in blood by Samurai-descendent Yuri Shimojo in collaboration with ink-maker Jason Logan; a heart-centered sculpture made with ritual white dirt by East African artist Valerie Piraino; honorific rip-rap from nuclear containment sites by geochemist Dr. Morgan Williams; an empowering Tibetan Buddhist treasure vase from His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche’s lineage by Treasure of Abundance; and other potent and auspicious offerings.

Works by: Camas Logue, Sarah Hudson, Valerie Piraino, Onya McCausland, Charles Simonds and Rudy Burckhardt, Yuri Shimojo and Jason Logan, Kelley O’Leary, Morgan Williams, Treasure of Abundance, Alana Siegel, Maru García, Marilú Ríos Guerrero, Heidi Gustafson, Thomas Little and Dylan Kehde Roelofs, Tilke Elkins and Wild Pigment Project, Charles Deimler, and Corwin Fergus.

Feeding the Unseen’s opening reception will include a curators’ dialogue, titled “Rocks in our Heads,” between artist Heidi Gustafson and PRS Contributing Scholar Devon Deimler. Book of Earth by Heidi Gustafson also celebrates its LA debut on this occasion (author will be available for book signings and copies will be available for purchase). ​

Supported by The Art of Soil

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) was a Swiss-born American photographer and filmmaker known for his portraits of artists, images of New York, and his 1940 film Pursuit of Happiness. He was a contributor to the New York art scene as a documentarian and participant throughout the 20th century, photographing the birth and rise of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. In his own work, Burckhardt captured quotidian moments of the city, its people, and the demolition and construction of its changing neighborhoods. During the 1950s, he collaborated with Joseph Cornell on several experimental short films. From 1967-1975, he taught filmmaking and painting at the University of Pennsylvania.

Burckhardt’s work has been extensively exhibited in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally in such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, LACMA, and the Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland, with many of his works now in these permanent collections. Given the breadth of Rudy’s documentation of New York City and its artists, Burckhardt’s photographs have been reproduced hundreds of times for commercial and academic purposes.

Charles R. Deimler was born and raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, on farms in some of the best non-irrigated land in the world. Growing up alongside Mennonite and Amish communities, for Charles, life was always about the land and the soil. As a young Taurus, he was always in the dirt and clay, and in his teens, he joined the 4-H soil and water conservation program. Since 1982 he has co-owned Ephrata Precision Parts, a jobbing machine shop and molded polyurethane business. His time is split between farm and factory.

In 2009, he and his wife Holly bought a farm in Burnt Cabins, Pennsylvania. With the help of their son, Dylan, they have remediated the land from its former use as commercial crop fields to a sustainable, organic farm, one recognized by the state as a model for conservation. Dry Barn Farm has planted over 1,000 trees on their 123-acres, reinstated wildflower fields, is protecting its wetlands, and has restored the riparian buffer on its streams to ensure its headwater sources leading to the Susquehanna River are of highest quality. For Dry Barn Farm, sustainability is a goal, not a hobby. In addition to vegetable crops, orchard fruits, and berries (both wild and domestic), the Deimlers raise grass-fed, rotationally grazed beef; pasture chickens, pigs, sheep, and goats; and tend honeybee hives. They saw timber and gather nuts and mushrooms from their woods.

The farm is also the site of sustainable artwork. Charles has deepened his connection to the land and his natural gifts as an artist by hand-harvesting and processing wild clay from the farm’s soil, which he spins, sculpts, and fires. In 2020, Charles transformed the farm’s old spring house into a potter's shed studio. When digging out invasive plants, Charles is always on the lookout for a nice clay vein that, when processed, will make its way onto his potter’s wheel.
// drybarnfarm.com

Corwin Fergus is a photographer, filmmaker, writer and Jungian analyst. He has a BA from Tufts University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a diploma in Analytic Psychology from the CG Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. He lives in the Methow Valley in Washington State.  His work is concerned with the interface and continuum of matter and psyche. His 16mm film "Oil and Water: Reflections on Nature, Psyche and Madness," shot mostly from a kayak in Prince Williams sound before, during and after the Exxon Valdez oil spill won documentary film awards and played at major film festivals worldwide.
// Corwinfergus.com
// oilandwaterfilm.com

Maru García is a Mexican, LA-based artist/chemist working across art + science + environment. Her methodology combines laboratory and fieldwork tools from her background in plant chemistry and the pharmaceutical industry. Her use of media includes research, installations, performance, sculpture, and video, usually with the presence of organic matter to help understand the biological processes occurring in complex systems. Her areas of interest are biosystems, multispecies relations, and the capacity of living organisms (including humans) to act as remediators in contaminated sites. Her work highlights the importance of eco-aesthetics, in which relations are proposed as ways of building cultures of regeneration. At the same time, she questions the ways science and technology have influenced humans and more-than-humans within the natural world.

Maru has participated in conferences, solo and group exhibitions in North America, Europe, and Asia. She is an Associate Research Scientist in Mineral Sciences at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the founder of Biomedia Studio and Prospering backyards. Maru holds an MFA in Design & Media Arts from UCLA, as well as an MS in Biotechnology and a BS in Chemistry both from Tecnológico de Monterrey, México.
@marugfe // marugarciastudio.com

Sarah Hudson is a Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Pūkeko artist, researcher, and mum from Whakatāne, Aotearoa. As a founding member of Kauae Raro Research Collective, Sarah has spent the last three years promoting and protecting Māori earth pigment paint-making practices. She splits her time between home-educating her 7-year-old, implementing research projects for Kauae Raro, and creating works with her other art collaboration, Mataaho Collective.

Sarah's practice reconnects with her ancestral lands and practices through kinship, reciprocity, and responsibility. With works conceptually grounded in relationships with people and places, collectivity and collaboration are of utmost importance. Through her solo praxis, she's recently exhibited 're:place' at Blue Oyster Gallery in Dunedin (2022), was a part of 'Māori Moving Image' at Christchurch Art Gallery (2021), and presented a paper 'Serious Fun' about visible Māori joy in contemporary art for the Ockham Lecture series at Objectspace in Auckland (2021). As a member of Mataaho Collective, Sarah received the Walters Prize in 2021 which is currently New Zealand's largest contemporary art prize, and in 2022 Mataaho received the Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Award.  
@shark_father // sarahhudson.co.nz 

Thomas Little is an ink maker who explores mystic and scientific concepts through the lens of ink and our relationship to mark making.  He gathers threads from alchemical imagery, chemical phenomena, and mystic observations to incorporate them into a holistic synthesis theory of art-science-magic. The natural world informs his work with ink, not only the materials used, but the relationships expressed between plant, animal, and elements.
@a.rural.pen

Jason S. Logan is a Toronto-based creative director and strategic graphic designer.  Recent projects include branding, identity and creative direction for Horses Atelier, a smellmap for the The New York Times and Creative Direction for Rogers Publishing. Logan is also the author of several books and the founder of the Toronto Ink Company. In 2014 he lead the CDTO campaign and initiative to build an Office of Creative Direction for the City of Toronto.
He is the subject of the 2022 documentary, The Colour of Ink (dir. Brian D. Johnson). 
@torontoinkcompany

Camas Logue is a multidisciplinary artist and enrolled Klamath tribal member from the ewksiknii, modokish, and numu people. Logue’s practice includes painting, printmaking, weaving, carving, installation, and public art.

Logue lives with his family in the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community in northwest Washington, where he works as an apprentice alongside his father-in-law, Swinomish elder and master carver Kevin Paul. Together, they work on community carving projects including pole carvings and show pieces. Additionally, Logue has been studying and teaching northwest coastal, ewksiknii, and modokish weaving since 2014.

Alongside his traditional and studio art practices, Logue is also a professional musician, playing drums and guitar in the band Black Belt Eagle Scout, which is led by his wife, Katherine Paul. Logue has toured in the band internationally, playing live and in studio performances on NPR, KEXP, and WNYC, and at SXSW, Pickathon Old Growth Sessions, and on the Netflix series Trinkets. Logue is featured in the film Love and Fury, directed by Sterlin Harjo, and the short film Red Brigade Films Spotlight: Black Belt Eagle Scout, directed by Razelle Benally.
​
Onya McCausland is an artist based in London, UK. Her work explores different kinds of raw materials as a means to examine the medium and subject of painting as a social and conceptual tool. The materials she works with hold complex histories associated with distinct geographical regions and land, such as historic and contemporary extractive mining practices – that underpin and shape the social, economic and physical make-up of the landscapes they are part of.

Onya McCausland’s research led to the development of the first exterior grade wall emulsion paint using coal mine waste iron mineral residues. Onya is founder and co-director of a Community Interest Company called Turning Landscape CIC which works with and in the community and landscape of the former mining village of Six Bells, Blaenau Gwent, South Wales in the UK. All proceeds from paint sales are redirected into creative and educational events with the local community. Onya McCausland is a lecturer and Head of Undergraduate Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.
@onyamccausland // turninglandscape.com 

Kelley O’Leary (b.1988 Quincy, Massachusetts) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Northern California. She received a MFA in Art Studio from University of California, Davis and a BA in Art with a minor in Anthropology from University of California, Santa Cruz. O’Leary’s speculative, research-based practice investigates the role of digital technology from multiple human and non-human perspectives in an age of ecological collapse. Her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. at Root Division, Irving Street Projects, Jan Shrem & Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Southern Exposure, Wolfman Books, Incline Gallery, Palette SF, The Great Highway Gallery, Annex Gallery at Monterey Peninsula College, Union Gallery at UMass Amherst and Studio 106 LA among others. She has received fellowships and residencies from Bullseye Glass, Irving Street Projects, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Collaborative Arts Mobility Project, Kala Art Institute and Art Farm. She was the recipient of the Dean’s Summer Research Fellowship, the Mary Lou Osborn Award and the LeShelle and Gary May Art Purchase Prize at University of California, Davis.
Kelley is one of fifteen artists and five curators in Imaginaries of the Future Collective, a self-organizing nomadic collective of artists and thinkers.
@kelley__oleary

Valerie Piraino is an East African sculptor and writer based on the traditional land of the Lenape People in New York. She was born in Kigali, Rwanda in 1981 and raised in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ethiopia, and the United States. She has been a visual artist since she was a teenager and was the first recipient of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Travel Award in 2004, providing the means for her to return to her point of origin in Rwanda. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and publications including, African Artists by Phaidon, an A-Z survey of the work of over 300 artists born or based in Africa. She recently self-published her debut monograph, Point of Origin: A Monographic Memoir, weaving her life story, personal pictures, and over fifteen years of work as a sculptor.
@valeriepirainostudio // valeriepiraino.com 

Marilú Ríos Guerrero is a transdisciplinary Mexican artist who plants, cultivates, harvests and collects natural materials for her creations & activation of individual, communitarian and collaborative processes. The traces of her actions are registered through multidisciplinary artistic languages that she often documents with photography or video. Currently her artistic research is focused on activating and linking the therapeutic properties of the mineral, vegetable, fungi kingdom and some insects with their dyeing and malleable qualities through pictorial, sculptural and textile acts. Putting her findings at the service of communities or individuals that require them, by facilitating co-creative acts, art therapy sessions or sharing her knowledge through educational workshops for all audiences. 

She has a Master in Arts and Environment for the Postgraduate Arts and Design, FAD, UNAM (2019), with Honorable Mention for her research entitled "Psychic and biological transmutations from artistic creation with natural materials"; a Degree in Visual and Media Arts, CEDIM (2010) with distinction Summa Cum Laude and Honors for her research “The possibilities of art as a means for social transformation”; Diploma in Neuro Science and Aesthetic Neuro (2017) from the Faculty of Medicine of the UNAM, CDMX., diploma in Art Therapy from the CEP, CDMX. (2012), and some others. She has been accredited to several awards and scholarships like: CEP UNAM Scholarship (2016-2018), PIDAC 2016 1ed., CONARTE, N.L., Mex. (2016); Chain for Betters, WU, England (2015); Artistic Creation Grant Dom. Known 3rd Ed., CCUT-UVA, CDMX (2013). She has 6 individual exhibitions and more than 23 collective exhibitions in museums, galleries and independent spaces in Australia, Spain, USA and Mexico. Since 2008 she has created and taught more than fifty workshops for all audiences where various topics are explored using art as a tool for education, healing, mediation, meditation, reconnection with nature and free expression in Mexico and USA. 
@Marilú Ríos Guerrero // mariluriosguerrero.com 

Yuri Shimojo is a Tokyo-born, contemporary Japanese painter who lives and works between New York and Kyoto. The last descendent of her samurai clan who lost all her immediate family members before the age of 30, Shimojo has always used painting to express the interconnected emotions of impermanence. Using traditional Japanese watercolor or ground SUMI and SHU ink, her work combines the abstract and the surreal, often playfully and always evocative of the desire for universal compassion.

With minimal formal training in fine art, her style is grounded in the practice of classical Japanese dance. Her publications include a memoir of her unique childhood with her late family. She also spent many years studying Hawaiian healing practices and spirituality. These experiences of moving between cultures have influenced her work throughout her life and continue to bring new sources of inspiration.
​
She has exhibited in the U.S. and Japan and is in private collections around the world.
@yurishimojo // yurishimojo.com 

Alana Siegel is a poet, director, and photographer. She grew up in Los Angeles, and attended Bard College, completing her degree in Language and Literature, with a focus in Poetry. Her first published book, Archipelago, was released by Station Hill Press in 2012. She lived in the Bay area for 6 years, organizing poetry readings, free, communal education, and was one of the core curators for the Alette in Oakland conference celebrating the work of Alice Notley, in which she also directed her play, “Anne’s White Glove.” She completed a traditional three year Buddhist retreat in the Santa Cruz Mountains from 2016-2019, and now lives in New Kingston, New York, where she works as a Freelance editor as well as the Middletown deputy town clerk. She recently brought back to life the Whoop de Doo, a community celebration of country life. She continues to write, photograph, and direct and act in performances that are highly collaborative across many mediums.
​
Charles Simonds is an American artist and sculptor based in New York. He earned his BA from University of California Berkeley in 1967 and MFA from Rutgers in 1969. Simonds’ career began with his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1975, followed closely by an installation at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976. Simonds’ work has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Guggenheim; Galerie Nationale de Jeu de Paume, Paris; Insitut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia; and a Dwellings installation at NYC’s Breuer Building, commissioned by the Whitney Museum.
​
Simonds is best known for his sculptural series, Dwellings, small clay sculptures installed in crevices and vacant lots, beginning in the 1970s in New York City, and since expanding to installations around the world. His sculpture features themes of birth, growth, death, decay, and sexuality, all rendered in materials as diverse as clay, steel, cement, plaster, and porcelain.
// charles-simonds.com

The Vajrayana Foundation’s mission is to establish, preserve and transmit the spiritual, cultural and artistic traditions of Tibetan Buddhism in the West. Produced at our Retreat Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Treasure Vases are a symbolic expression of the sacred quality of form, which can help to reveal the inner enlightened quality of the mind. Just being in their presence can heal mental and emotional suffering and bring lasting peace.

As a product centered around Tibetan traditions, to this day the vases produced by Treasure of Abundance are blessed and consecrated by the lineage masters at Pema Osel Ling, all students of Dudjom Rinpoche. The Foundation offers a curated range of vases designed by Lama Tharchin Rinpoche, each uniquely beautiful, interesting, and within tradition. The vase project has expanded in recent years under the careful guidance of Lama Sonam Rinpoche, the current head of the Vajrayana Foundation.
​@tibetantreasurevase //treasureofabundance.com
​@vajrayanafoundation //www.vajrayana.org

Tilke Elkins is a painter, writer, and curator based on Kalapuya territory / Oregon, focused on site-specific/responsive painting and social practice art. Tilke has worked with mineral and botanical pigments since 2007, and is the founding director of Wild Pigment Project, a collaborative initiative she established in 2019 to promote ecological balance and regenerative economies through a passion for wild pigments, their places of origin, and their cultural histories. Her work is currently on view at the NMSU Museum, as part of the Wild Pigment Project Group Exhibition, which is a selection of work curated for form & concept gallery, Santa Fe in Fall 2022.
​@tilkeelkins // tilkeelkins.com 

Wild Pigment Project, founded by artist Tilke Elkins in 2019, promotes ecological balance and regenerative economies through a passion for wild pigments, their places of origin, and their cultural histories. The project connects artists to the land by providing resources, education and inspiration to integrate plant and mineral pigments, hand-gathered and prepared in local landscapes, into studio practice.

Wild Pigment Project has been a nexus point for the burgeoning global wild pigment movement. Bringing together painters and dyers, ink-makers and ceramicists, researchers, scientists and traditional cultural practitioners to explore pigments found in plants, minerals and the industrial waste stream. Wild Pigment Project is dedicated to fostering difficult conversations about land and cultural histories by exploring what it means to forage for art materials in the era of climate catastrophe and renewed confrontation of colonial racism and cultural genocide.

In order to explore these questions through widespread conversations, Wild Pigment Project initiated a monthly pigment subscription called Ground Bright, inviting a different artist-forager to donate pigment each month. The pigment was packaged and labeled by hand, and mailed out to anyone interested in subscribing for a nominal fee (initially $11/month, now $22). 22% of net proceeds were donated each month to a land or cultural stewardship organization relevant to the land where the pigment was foraged, chosen by the artist contributing the pigment. The packets, sent out in small brown envelopes, included information about the artist-forager, their contributed pigment, a recipe or instructions for a way to use the pigment, and a description of the recipient of the 22% donation.

The project engaged each contributing artist through an interview in the newsletter, Pied Midden (‘pied’ as in ‘piper,’ midden = trash heap), fostering in-depth conversations about the intricate relationships connected to pigments and pigment-foraging. Indigenous pigment protocols and knowledge revitalization, scientific racism and legacies of colonialism in African Caribbean textile history, indigenous sovereignty and Land Back, waterway repair from Acid Mine Drainage, and the transmutation of guns into ink have all been subjects of discussions that have taken place between a wide range of artists, poets, researchers and cultural practitioners worldwide.

The slowly evolving conversations evoked through the project have resulted in a shift in pigments featured through Ground Bright. The act of sending soil away from its place of origin invokes complex questions best addressed on a personal scale, by each person who chooses to engage in a foraging relationship with land. For this reason, Ground Bright no longer offers foraged earth and botanical pigments, but instead focuses on those sourced in the waste stream — materials that result from human activities, such as discarded scientific soil samples, reclaimed iron oxides, overabundant botanicals, and landscaping compost. These materials, which result from systems established by colonial behaviors, can be reintegrated into purposeful relationships through the creative community of artists involved in the project — subscribers, contributors and pigment enthusiasts

As of June 2023, Ground Bright has featured 47 pigments from 35 contributors, and has donated a total of more than 33K between 40 different organizations, with Ground Bright subscribers in 16 countries.

As part of continuing to foster complex conversations about wild pigments, Wild Pigment Project is launching a new lecture series, Pigments As Catalysts, featuring artists and others collaborating with pigments in contexts of healing, action and decolonization.
​@wildpigmentproject // wildpigmentproject.org 

Morgan M Williams is a forensic pedologist, soil seer, and earth worker who has worked with the Department of Energy to investigate geotechnical change and long-term performance at nuclear waste containment sites across North America, particularly on the Colorado Plateau, where he resides. In becoming fluent in the language of these places, Morgan honors their personality, distinct behaviors, and needs. To him, there is being-ness to these places.

Devon Deimler, PhD is an artist, writer, mythologist, and teacher. She is adjunct faculty in Pacifica Graduate Institute's Depth Psychology and Creativity (DCH) and Mythological Studies programs, the latter of which is her alma mater. Devon's doctoral dissertation, Ultraviolet Concrete: Dionysos and the Ecstatic Play of Aesthetic Experience, received the institute’s Dissertation of Excellence award. Devon earned her BA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her professional experience in art and music includes founding an independent record label and collaborative event project, Wildfire Wildfire Productions, and working as Assistant to the Director at the Dennis Hopper Art Trust. She is currently Curator at OPUS Archives and Research Center, home to the collections of James Hillman, Joseph Campbell, and Marija Gimbutas, among others. 
​@devondeimler // devondeimler.com 

​Heidi Gustafson is an artist and ochre specialist with a working archive of more than 600 pigments. She frequently collaborates with artists, award-winning scientists, paleontologists, and other experts, including Jason Logan, author of Abrams’ bestselling book Make Ink. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
 @heidilynnheidilynn // earlyfutures.com/
​

Feeding the Unseen: Remediations of Earth Group exhibition curated by Heidi Gustafson and Devon Deimler & Book of Earth: A Guide to Ochre, Pigment, and Raw Color by Heidi Gustafson Book release
Opening Reception and Book Release: June 3, 2023 
Gallery Opens for Preview: 3:00pm | Wine and Cheese Reception: 5:00-6:00pm
​Curators’ Talk: 6:00-7:00pm | WATCH NOW ON YOUTUBE​

On View: June 3-July 30, 2023
Regular Exhibit Hours: Tuesday - Friday 12:00-6:00pm, and by appointment ([email protected])

Virtual Artists Panel: July 15, 2023
12:00-2:00pm | RSVP

You can purchase the Book of Earth at the PRS Bookstore! 

Book of Earth by Heidi Gustafson

ABOUT BOOK OF EARTH: Art meets science in this guide to creating color with earth’s extraordinary pigments and exploring their fascinating uses today and throughout history
Part anthropological study, part art book, and part how-to, Book of Earth immerses you in the world of ochre, a naturally occurring mineral used to make pigment. Each chapter delves into author Heidi Gustafson’s rare pigment archive and provides a thorough exploration of natural color, while challenging our notions of the inanimate world. The book includes practical advice and techniques for creating your own pigments and applying these skills in everyday life.
Called the “ochre whisperer” by American Craft, and noted as the “woman archiving the world’s ochre,” in the New York Times, her personal collection of more than 600 pigments from around the planet is a unique treasure, and her passion and field experience will captivate you from the first page to the last. Available at the PRS Bookstore!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Heidi Gustafson is an artist and ochre specialist with a working archive of more than 600 pigments. She frequently collaborates with artists, award-winning scientists, paleontologists, and other experts, including Jason Logan, author of Abrams’ bestselling book Make Ink. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

---

---

Point of Origin: A Monographic Memoir
by Valerie Piraino
At over 400 pages, Point of Origin: A Monographic Memoir is the debut book by East African sculptor Valerie Piraino. This hardcover printing brings beautiful reproductions of Piraino's work together with design details like a gold ribbon bookmark and foil stamped covers.
​
Both memoir and monograph, Piraino defines herself and her creative work in her own words and images. Weaving her life story, personal pictures, and over fifteen years of work as a sculptor, Piraino shares some of her early influences, including her formative years throughout Africa and the impact of personal loss. 

available at the PRS BOOKSTORE!