Season One: Terrestrial Sara Morawetz: Étalon

Season One: Terrestrial

A world of wonder, magic, and leaps of imagination may be just what it takes to understand the past and reimagine the future. Artists of Season One: Terrestrial explore the terrestrial plane of our planet through the lenses of history, consumer culture, science fiction and fabulism, taking us on a larger-than-life journey through familiar and unfamiliar landscapes. Time fades as we are silenced for a moment to ponder, what do we know about our natural world and how is it that we came to know it?

What might at first seem like wild conceits, artists in this season, across multiple exhibitions present the land back to us reimagined.

The lines between history and fiction become less clear as artists explore and expose truths about our impact, our assumptions and how we will need to engage with the beauty and magic of the terrestrial if we are to preserve it. Through the slipping states, and ethereal grace of land bound places, reimagined, enlivened as if speaking to us through the magic of art, those practitioners – as conduits- probe and point to ultimately interconnected states of existence on Earth.

The exhibition is part of the 2024-25 Seasons program, seeking to connect the artists and regional experiences so often on the frontlines of climate, economic, and political change, showing us the inherent interdependence of our physical ecosystems and that we in turn are not only interconnected but that our future is inescapably and powerfully collective.

Étalon

Trace the steps of 18th Century French astronomers and philosophies of science in Sara Morwetz’s solo odyssey Étalon.

Étalon was devised as an encounter with the metre as a physical, emotional and conceptual postulate, experienced over an expansive terrain. Each step was an act of (re)evaluation and (re)consideration — examining the lived action of measurement and scientific exploration through the female gaze. That the term for a standard of measurement — an étalon — also denotes a stallion [a male-exemplar; a breeding horse] betrays a remarkable etymological tension; underscoring the overtly masculine framework entrenched within scientific discourse. This female-led expedition serves as a much-needed countermeasure; privileging a perspective distinctly lacking within the historical narrative. This new ‘mètre-étalon’ is formed by a collective of voices — brought together to expand upon existent forms of knowledge and to focus on a mode of production [as much as that which is produced]. Here, the new ‘standard’ is something more than a fixed and immutable construct — it is a shared phenomenological encounter; an assemblage of time passed and distance travelled; a measuring of self against the limits of our own domain.

Image: Sara Morawetz, étalon, 2018, performance documentation of a durational action / 112 days; 2,108.7 km. Courtesy the artist.