Queer Ecology - Jake Starr

Queer Ecology

Jake Starr and Steven Cavanagh

Shown at Schmick Contemporary February 9 - February 25, 2023

Through the framework of Judith Butler’s theory of ecological assemblage which refutes the idea of ecosystem’s as self-regulating, Starr interrogates the emergent relationships of organisms under constant anthropocentric flux. We, as a human species, are offered two opposing futures. We either embrace the human as macrobiota, a symbiotic component of a multi-species superorganism, or we continue to isolate, as extremophiles, in our creation of a sterile earth.

Cavanagh takes a leap from Irish philosopher George Berkely “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound.” Unanswerable questions and unknowable realities. The work speaks to the idea that what is not seen or heard, may never be verified, never defined and never accepted as truth. Simply a never-ending loop of imagined experience and existence.

Starr and Cavanagh explore imagery as a metaphor for historical queerness and the current deconstruction of ways of being. Thinking outside of the human frame and beyond ourselves, the unknowable realities that define human experience are no more than a thought experiment which can never be labelled and always in flux.

Works:

Steven Cavanagh

An early 18th century thought experiment

inkjet print on Platine fibre rag

180 x 200 cm

2019

Steven Cavanagh

Box 1