Ash Arder is a transdisciplinary artist who creates idea and object-based systems for interpreting and re-imagining interspecies relations (i.e. relations between humans and plants). This highly flexible, research-based approach examines these relationships primarily through pop culture and historic lenses. Arder’s systems and “exercises” take on forms including installation, sound, drawing, electronics, video and performance. Each ponders the role of agency, both active and passive, in co-creating an event or phenomenon. Arder is interested in complicating viewers’ own understanding of their proximity to and participation in the systems and cycles reflected in her work and subsequently at larger societal and ecological scales. These complications or moments of tension between living things, objects and space serve as a catalyst for interrogating the very conditions responsible for the glitch. Arder’s work and research probe historical events and pop culture (future history) for insight into what she understands to be “relational glitches,” or ruptures in empathy.

Arder worked to continue developing a multi-sensory body of work that examines human-plant relations through the lens of agricultural experiments in 19th century Louisiana. Archival reports from these experiments and found field recordings are used as source material for new works that question historic human-plant relations and speculate about the future of that exchange.

Gallery photos by Sabree Hill