Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art
August 4 - September 10, 2023
Sometime in the early 8th century, deep in a German forest, Anglo-Saxon missionary Saint Boniface and his entourage spent hours chopping down a giant oak tree as horrified pagans looked on helplessly. Donar’s Oak, also called Thor’s Oak, was felled in a show of dominance as part of a larger (successful) effort to Christianize Germany. Groves of trees were the churches of many pre-Christian religions. In Old High German the words “temple” and “holy grove” have the same semantic origins. It was common practice during this period to destroy sacred natural sites to demonstrate the Christian God’s might, strike fear in the hearts of non-believers, and attempt to erase these older belief systems. The story goes that the wood harvested from Donar’s Oak was used to build a church dedicated to Saint Peter.
Reverence for nature once transcended territories, borders, mountain ranges, and oceans. Holy places—clusters of trees, piles of stones, ancient meadows—leave little archaeological record, and yet traces of this belief system linger in ways we might not notice: in myths, songs, rituals, and art. Nature worship is an important part of many religions to this day, but this belief system is often directly at odds with capitalistic attitudes of resource extraction and human supremacy.
This exhibition features artists whose works complicate and reorient our understanding of our place within what writer James Bridle terms the “more-than-human” world. These artworks ask us to shift our perspective and invite empathy in; to open ourselves up to valuing relationships over abilities; to elevate shared, interconnected life above the level of dominance of nature demonstrated by Boniface. The natural world has the potential to teach, heal, awe, and uplift, but only if we can embrace the challenge and invitation always present in the non-human world.
Artists: Ryan Arthurs (Buffalo, NY), Eve Biddle (Wassaic, NY), Crystal Z. Campbell (Buffalo, NY, and Oklahoma), Paul Morgan (Los Angeles, CA), Eli Thorne (Kingston, NY), Olivia Long (Buffalo, NY), Casey Mark Schultz (Buffalo, NY), Rachel Shelton (Buffalo, NY), virocode (Buffalo, NY)
Read more here.