Future Nature:
Cultivating the Conditions for Ongoingness
Running September 29th 2025 through December 14th 2025
About the Show:
Future Nature: Cultivating the Conditions for Ongoingness presents lens-based documentation of an ecological artwork in West Texas that emerged from the fallow edge spaces of human-disturbed landscapes. Future Nature composts the conditions of these sites into teachings about resilience, livability, and multispecies collaboration in an increasingly hotter and drier climate.
The work centers the autorewilding Honey Mesquite (Netulma Glandulosa) tree and its weedy companion plants of the endangered shortgrass prairie. The exhibition traces the assisted migration of these weedy plants from sites of production (agricultural land where endemic plants are considered a nuisance) to sites of nurturing and care: the tree-sparse urban center of Lubbock, TX.
About the Artists:
Erin Charpentier and Travis Neel work at the unruly edges of art and urban ecology to explore the possibility of collaborative survival within the weedy entanglements of human-disturbed landscapes.
Currently, their work centers the Honey Mesquite tree—the charismatic and thorny protagonist of the Llano Estacado’s ecological theater in West Texas. In an attempt to understand the Honey Mesquite, they have become enmeshed in a symbiotic association with other artists, landscape architects, neighbors, Chihuahuan desert and Short Grass prairie plant communities, ranchers, arborists, insects, bacteria, rainwater, mycorrhiza, and the City of Lubbock. Together, this community of actors have manifested the Mesquite Mile, an expanding network of sites designed to provide solar cooling with gentle shade, irrigate drought-hardy plants with stormwater runoff through green infrastructure, and increase biodiversity in Lubbock, TX.
Their collaborative work has been supported and recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mid-America Arts Alliance’s Interchange Artists Fellowship program, Headlands Center for the Arts, Southwest Contemporary, the British Cultural Council, Stoveworks Artist Residency, the Tallgrass Artist Residency, the Brooklyn Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Temple Contemporary, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the RedLine Contemporary Art Center, and numerous DIY art spaces across the United States and Canada.
About the Gallery:
Gallery Photoland is a non-traditional exhibition space that showcases established photographic artists who represent diverse experiences and world views. The Gallery functions to spark ideas and support connections across the Evergreen community; it is a place for inspiring students about possibilities in fine arts beyond the shores of Eld Inlet.
The Gallery hosts exhibitions aligned with the mission of The Evergreen State College.
Install Photographs
