Eco-political artist conjures red wolves through public art and experimental installations
On View October 21, 2022 – August 27, 2023 | Overlook Gallery & SECCA Grounds
SECCA is proud to host Lauren Strohacker: Old Red, I Know Where Thou Dwellest, a site-specific multimedia exhibition exploring the ongoing struggle for survival of red wolves. The exhibition opens on Friday, October 21, 2022 and will remain on view through August 27, 2023. The three-part exhibition is comprised of an installed multi-sensory experience in SECCA's Overlook Gallery, an outdoor sound installation on SECCA's grounds, and a series of free projection-based events occurring at SECCA and sites across Winston-Salem.
An opening reception for Old Red, I Know Where Thou Dwellest will be held at SECCA on Friday, October 21 from 6:30–8pm. Admission is free, with a suggested $10 donation.
Red wolves are facing a second extinction in the wild. The last known group of wild individuals are known to roam in and around the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in eastern North Carolina.
For red wolves, the state of North Carolina is both haunted and hallowed. The first court-recorded wolf bounties began in the state in 1768. Just over two centuries later, North Carolina became the first state to revive the species from wild extinction when two breeding pairs of red wolves were released into the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in 1987. This dichotomy of eradication, restoration, and the ongoing struggle of the species is the inspiration for this exhibition.
"Wild red wolves are federally recognized as an NEP, a nonessential experimental population. With this exhibition, I am creatively reintroducing experimental populations of red wolves through light and sound, widening the scope for humans to consider their proximity to and tolerance for the most endangered wolves in the world, fighting for survival just 300 miles due east of the museum," said artist Lauren Strohacker.
Eco-political artist Lauren Strohacker has collaborated with computational artist Dr. Lisa Minerva Tolentino, The Wolf Conservation Center, and the North Carolina Zoo to present three conceptual encounters with red wolves within and beyond SECCA. Taken as a whole, Old Red, I Know Where Thou Dwellest reflects Strohacker's ongoing efforts to enfold ecology, politics, and notions of radical interspecies municipalism through her co-creative and site-responsive practice.
LEUKOS LUKOS
"...the Greek word for wolf, lukos, is so close to the word 'light', leukos, that it has often been mistaken in translation." – Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, 1978
Leukos Lukos is uncivilized decor. Contemporary floor lighting– typically decorative, controllable, peaceful, and predictable– is reimagined and "rewilded" as creative light intrusions in SECCA's Overlook Gallery. Stochastic code transforms LED light strips into labile, ground-moving beings the length of red wolves. These are not artworks that only represent animals, they are artworks that move as animals: appearing, walking, running, stopping, circling, surrounding, and disappearing. Thus, each experience with Leukos Lukos is unique.
Leukos Lukos is made in collaboration with Dr. Lisa Minerva Tolentino, a computational artist, musician, and interaction designer. This project is supported in part by the Arizona Commission on the Arts which receives support from the State of Arizona and the National Endowment for the Arts.
GROUND WORK
Premiering at the exhibition's opening reception on Friday, October 21 is Ground Work, a hyper-mobile digitally projected pack of life-size red wolves. The experience will be activated via a series of free, public, outdoor projection events held within the species' historic range, which includes nearly all of the eastern and southeastern United States. Portable projection screens and battery-operated pico projectors create eight life-size video projections of red wolves, the average size of a red wolf pack, for viewers to perceive and interact with. Ground Work is a visual echo of the red wolves making their last stand on the North Carolina coast and an invocation to redevelop equitable interspecies relationships between humans and red wolves at large.
Red wolves were filmed by Strohacker with special permission from the North Carolina Zoo, where she worked closely with Chris Lasher, coordinator for the American Red Wolf Species Survival Plan. The inaugural Ground Work event takes place in North Carolina, the first state historically to issue a bounty on wolves in the area and the only state to currently support a wild pack. Ground Work imagines a landscape re-enchanted with red wolves – holding space to consider the social, political, and ecological processes of inviting "Old Red" home.
Ground Work is supported by a creative grant from the Culture & Animals Foundation.
SUCH MUSIC AS I HAVE NEVER HEARD
The first entry referencing wolves in the North Carolina Moravian records states, "The wolves here give us music every morning, from six corners at once, such music as I have never heard." The entry then immediately goes on to describe the benefits of killing the wolves and other predators.
Howls once filled the skies above the continent's eastern and southeastern regions. Such music as I have never heard is a collection of red wolf howls, courtesy of the Wolf Conservation Center, triangulated with outdoor speakers to fill a modicum of the species' historic range– SECCA's front lawn– for the duration of the exhibition.
ABOUT LAUREN STROHACKER
Lauren Strohacker is an eco-political artist. Her new genre public work emphasizes the non-human in an increasingly human-centric world. Born in Ohio in 1983, she received a BFA (2006) from The Ohio State University and an MFA(2011) from Arizona State University. Strohacker is represented by Visions West Contemporary.
Strohacker's co-creative and site-responsive practice routinely consults and collaborates with wildlife conservation organizations to conceptualize animals who have been displaced by the colonial built environment, controlled by the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, and erased by the anthropocentrism of capitalism. Conceptually, Strohacker's focus on wildlife and public space reflects larger contexts of ecology, politics, and radical interspecies municipalism. Learn more about the artist at https://www.laurenstrohacker.org/.
Lisa Tolentino is a computational artist, musician and interaction designer. Her work focuses on improving lives in vulnerable and underrepresented communities. Trained in computer science, avant-garde and oral music traditions, transdisciplinary and participatory action research, user experience and interface design, and disability studies, Tolentino creates work that experiments with process and product: outcomes can be pragmatic, conceptual, reverent, agile and elegantly disruptive all at the same time.
In all stages and iterations of work, Tolentino establishes trust and connection with community partners through close collaboration. This process leads to designs that tackle otherwise hidden or non-obvious challenges. Further grounding her cultural work, Tolentino draws from indigenous research methodologies and her Ilocano-Filipino American heritage, both of which provide additional tools and lenses for problem-solving and design. Learn more about the artist at https://lisatolentino.com, and visit http://urbanstew.org/ to learn more about her arts-tech non-profit.
Leukos Lukos at SECCA from Lauren Strohacker on Vimeo.