Disarticulated Production
Alicia Escott
July 17th – August 29th
RECEPTION – Saturday, July 24th 5 – 8PM
The Great Highway Gallery is thrilled to present Disarticulated Production, installation and mixed media works by artist Alicia Escott.
Disarticulated Production
A sculpture of individual handmade drawings of Live Oak Acorns rendered on scraps of plastic gathered from construction sites throughout the city (and recology.) The plastic used on this is often used to cover sites of construction. Its clean, glossy, shrink wrapped aesthetic glossing over construction belies a material that off gasses terribly, creating an additional hazard for workers. Escott acquired a great amount of this material at recology, later during the pandemic and a subsequent injury that limited her mobility began cutting scraps of it down to make individual drawings of acorns, disarticulated from the larger piece as a way to continue making amid the interruptions of the pandemic, the work was in dialogue with daily walks though live oak tree habitat in a nearby park which she is helping to restore. Each drawing is a meditation on the possibility inherent in a single seed or acorn: the possibility of an entire oak tree, and all the entangled lives it supports. Thinking about the clearing of time and dismantling of systems during the pandemic in relationship to the clearing of space that fire or fallen trees create, opening up sun for new growth to emerge. Both byproducts of crisis. Each acorn was a meditation on slowness, intention, transformation and inherent possibility that only needs the right circumstances to manifest.
In the reverse of the possibility of a single tiny acorn or seed the messy accumulation and production in this work references the plethora of acorns produced by any given tree and the generosity of nourishment it returns to the multispecies community it is entangled within. Should only one acorn mature in all its years— it is success, a continuation of all of these efforts— if we should try to measure success in that way, genetically— and not in the squirrels, fungi or other entangled lives it nourishes.
As the fire season accelerates the meditation on these fire evolved trees, turns from possibly to desperation. The plastic used to cover construction sites for homes, melted to form a new join of things torn apart, the unsettled convergence of human homes and non-human homes amid land coevolved with fire. Referencing human participation in both historic Native collaboration with fire to shape the landscape and the subsequent suppression of fire by settlers over the last century, coupled with the production of fixed inhabitation. The fluid rigidity of the melted plastic references the artists unease and sense of collective precarity. By being each unique hand made drawings drawn from only 20 or acorns, this work also meditates on reproduction and mutation. The drawings of acorns remain what they are: images of the nut, entirely disassociated with the functions and realities of what each portrays. As with all of my work, this plays with the exploration of humans as image makers using the production and reproduction of images of “natural” or other-human life as a self-soothing device to cope with living amid omnicide.
About the Artist
Alicia Escott is an interdisciplinary artist based in The Outer Sunset district of San Francisco. She/they practice in solidarity with thinkers across fields undoing the construct of “nature” as a thing separated from us and our world. Escott work is informed by how we each are negotiating our immediate day-today realities and responsibilities amid an awareness of the overarching specter of climate change, massextinctio and the subsequent unspoken individual and collective experience of loss, heartbreak and\longing — as well as the related social and political unrest this rapid change, unprocessed grief and latent anxiety produces. She/they approach these issues with an interstitial practice that encompasses writing, drawing, painting, photography, video, sculpture, social-practice, and activism. Escott’s work has been shown in over 90 art institutions, galleries, and alternative spaces — including exhibitions at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Arts Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The San Francisco Maritime Museum, The Berkley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and The Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbra. She/they have been an Artist in Residence at Recology, The Growlery, Djerassi Artist Residency, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Irving Street Projects and The JB Blunk Artist Residency. Escott is a founding member of the collective 100 Days Action and half of the Social Practice Project The Bureau of Linguistical Reality. Her work has been featured in the Economist, The New Yorker, KQED, MOMUS, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. Her She holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, where she received the Richard K. Price Scholarship and a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago.
The Great Highway Gallery
3649 Lawton St.
San Francisco, CA 94122
phone: (415) 680-3891
email: info@thegreathighway.com
