Feb 3rd 2024

Bleached Out Reef: Panel Talk

@ Watershed Art & Ecology

1821 S Racine Ave, Chicago, IL 60608

Opening Saturday, February 3rd, at 2PM

Hi! Please come this Saturday @watershed.art.and.ecology for a discussion about my current show “Bleached Out Reef”. I will be in conversation with Dr. Mika Tosca @dr.mika , climate scientist and solar punk; and Melina Gioconda Morán Davis @melina.gaze , sexuality researcher and performance artist. I am really excited to get to talk with these brilliant minds about this work. Expect science, sexuality, seriousness AND silliness.

The talk will be Saturday, February 3rd at 2 PM. The location is 1821 South Racine, Chicago.

This will be the second to last open hours Saturday of the show. Show closes 2/11!

 

About the exhibition

Bleached Out Reef explores the interplay between natural and cultural processes, drawing parallels between ecological phenomena and human narratives. Centering on the phenomena of coral bleaching, where corals lose their vivid colors under environmental stressors, Bleached Out Reef can function as an environmental parable about the already-present crises caused by human-derived climate change. But the show also presents an extended metaphor about queerness, thriving, interconnectedness, and the contemporary condition.

Coral reefs are communities that allow difference to thrive. Coral reefs are interconnected superorganisms, full of complex webs relationships that defy attempts to classify. Like corals, queers build reefs. In these queer reefs, as coral reefs, divisions that typically stratify society such as age, race, and class are more porous. Unrelated individuals live in close proximity and support each other through highly specific and evolved relationships. The reproduction and promulgation of coral reefs and queer communities is both sexual and asexual, multigenerational, and non-hierarchical.

The architecture of a coral reef is an architecture of erotics. In a reef every individual is beautiful, different, naked, and close. Corals build their colonies until they press up against someone(thing?) they don’t like, sweeper tentacles deploy and growth is reoriented (through thousands of cloned selves) in new directions. Corals bud, this way, or that. Sometimes everyone spawns on a lunar calendar, just for collective release. Generations start, continue, learn, and grow at the same time. They build happy skeletons and die on each other until islands form and new terrestrial beings try to do what they have done.

In Bleached Out Reef, bleaching is polyvalent. At the first level, bleaching is the physical transformation of coral from colorful to ghostly due to the maladaptive expulsion of symbiotic zooxanthellae. Beyond that, bleaching is assimilation, gentrification, and the USA of both Biden and Trump. Bleaching is the obsession with cleanliness and separation in a post-COVID world. Bleaching is the loss of affect and depression when we find ourselves not thriving. Bleaching is drugs, both prescription and “recreational,” that we use to cope with a world that is in crisis and hostile.

David Nasca

David Nasca (born 1990 Buffalo, NY) is a Chicago-based visual artist working primarily in sculpture. He studied at Deep Springs College and received a BA from the University of Chicago (2012) and an MFA from Cornell University (2022). He has exhibited in the US and abroad at the Centro Cultural del México Contemporáneo (Mexico City), Roots and Culture (Chicago), Fuller Craft Museum (MA) and Gallatin Galleries at New York University (NY). Recent residencies include: the Corning Museum of Glass (NY), ACRE (WI), SOMA Mexico (CDMX), and The Banff Centre for The Arts and Culture (AB, Canada).

An educator, David is Assistant Professor of Ceramics at College of DuPage and previously taught sculpture at the Chicago High School for the Arts. Bringing contemporary art outside the white walls of the traditional gallery drives his curatorial practice. While in Chicago, he co-ran two DIY spaces: 1618 West 17th (focusing on queer performance art) and Showboat (focusing on projected film and video work and performance). At Cornell, he started a program bringing contemporary art to the near-abandoned Ithaca Mall.

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