No Action Alternative from Everything is Collective will be on display at the Farmer Family Gallery at The Ohio State University at Lima from May 4-July 27, 2023. A gallery opening with the artist collective is planned for 4-6 p.m., Thursday, May 4. It is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
Summer gallery visitation is by appointment. Email Ian Breidenbach at breidenbach.44@osu.edu.
No Action Alternative continues Everything Is Collective’s exploration of the relationship between images, technology, and power. This project broadly considers the image of nature in capitalism, and how it is used to normalize the exploitation of finite resources and support the myth of infinite economic growth. More specifically, the project looks at public land in the American West, probing the multiple and contradictory realities that exist within those landscapes, and exposing the disparate ways of seeing that condition our understanding of these places.
Using the Bureau of Land Management’s esoteric Visual Resource Management System (VRM) as a central node, the project examines the convergence of the American Landscape Tradition with ecology, geography, technology, bureaucracy, and late capitalism. Working in a variety of lens-based and digital media, the collective aims to subvert the guidance of the VRM system by using its protocols, images, and maps to discover what they conceal, and to hypothesize about the impalpable and often uncanny conditions that characterize the real American landscape.
The exhibition’s title, No Action Alternative, refers to a section of the National Environmental Policy Act that requires agencies to always describe and analyze what would happen if a federal project continued to operate and maintain into the future with no changes. This exhibition similarly questions a status quo future, and speculates about the need to develop new ways of seeing nature and understanding our environment when faced with a forecast of climate change and biodiversity loss.
About the artists
Everything Is Collective is an experimental art collective whose work addresses the links between images, subjectivity, power, and aesthetics. The group works collaboratively and across mediums and disciplines, and all works produced by the group are attributed to the group as a whole, not the individual members. Since 2013 the group has worked together on numerous exhibitions, publications, and web-based projects. The collective has exhibited their work nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions at the Aperture Foundation in New York, Royal Nonesuch Gallery in Oakland, Filter Space in Chicago, and the Urban Arts Space at The Ohio State University.
* * *
The gallery opening will be immediately preceded by a Research Talk with Dr. Robin Bagley about the insects of campus prairie in the Reed Hall Atrium.
Both events are free and open to the public.
- Learn more about the research talk at go.osu.edu/researchtalk