Event
Megafauna
(these desperate earthly forms)
Ezra Moth
Real Art Ways presents Megafauna (these desperate earthly forms), a solo exhibition by Real Art Awardee Ezra Moth.
My work teeters on the edge of speculation and functionality, between science fiction and practicality, and it always deals with the intersection of ecology and queer liberation. It is not medium specific and has been presented in the form of sculptures, speculative agriculture interventions, and performance artworks. Largely, I hope to present thoughtful and radical alternatives to the climate catastrophe, centering nonbinary and nonhuman perspectives in these future visualizations.
My materials are often living organisms: plants, algae, fungi, and bacteria. Part mad scientist and part drag persona, my art practice ricochets from sublime hopefulness to postapocalyptic despair, between humor and profundity. I often begin with a specific problem: unsustainable industrial agriculture practices, pharmaceutical companies’ monopolization of access to hormones, or water pollution – and from there, my storytelling, sculptures, and installations offer hypothetical and fantastical solutions.
I work in a community biology lab, hybridizing fennel plants for use in hormone replacement therapy. Alongside its strong estrogenic properties, fennel is also a host plant for native swallowtail caterpillars. These tall herbaceous bodies and their metamorphosizing residents had me imagining a future where gender is not regulated by policy or monopolized by pharmaceutical companies. Could I grow a garden of hormones in my backyard, and with those gardens, could my trans friends harvest and synthesize their own gender?
Megafauna (these desperate earthly forms) presents the process of that research: concentrated phytoestrogen extracted from the mutant plants created in my laboratory. Refrigerated and surrounded by traces of the scientific process, these vials of liquid are connected via a metaphorical umbilicus to a vast bioplastic form that inhabits the gallery space. This thing is neither vessel nor human nor animal. It is a specter that faces toward the present violence against trans bodies. A monstrous amalgamation of this fear: a symbiotic sludge of gelatine and seaweed and fennel and flesh.
About the Artist
Ezra Moth is an interdisciplinary artist whose work engages with ecology, queer identity, and the Anthropocene. Immersed in fantasy and dystopian futures, their installations contrive narratives through the lens of eco-feminism. Having studied sustainable agriculture and sculpture at UCONN, and performance art at Goldsmiths, University of London, their work spans both scientific curiosities and dreamlike utopias. Their installations and performances have been presented internationally in exhibitions and residencies such the Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival in Greece, Ortegay Y Gasset projects in Gowanus, RIXC center for new media culture in Latvia, Joya Arte + Ecologia in Spain, and the Queens Botanical Garden. They are currently based between Tolland, CT and Brooklyn, NY.
