Exhibition Text

What does it mean to belong to a body sprung from Mother Earth?

For thousands of years, humans have created art with and about the Earth. Whether through cave paintings or the Earthworks movement of the 1970s, the land has served as a way for people to connect with themselves and each other.

This Body This Earth is an exhibition that navigates the complexities of existing in an earthly form. With ceramic fossils that tell the stories of migrations or spiritual homes, sculptures that resemble humanoid forms, or photographs that prompt reflection of our shared humanity, this exhibition seeks to express the enduring bond between nature and the human experience.

Artists Charlotte Straus, Mouminatou Thiaw, Lucas Eytchison, Hannah Jun Langer, and Brendan O’Shaughnessy unfold new pathways for discovering embodiment and what it means to be of the Earth.

Artist Biographies

Brendan O’Shaughnessy is a Chicago-based visual artist. O’Shaughnessy holds an MFA from Temple University, and a BFA and BS in Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology from the University of Illinois. Through his expansive material approach, O’Shaughnessy’s sculptures challenge what we consider to be beautiful, perverse, and sensuous in our changing multi-species world. O’Shaughnessy has exhibited work in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Munich. O’Shaughnessy has received residencies from Anderson Ranch and Sculpture Space.

Charlotte Straus is a photographer based in Nashville, TN. She earned a BA from Lewis & Clark College and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Hartford. Her black-and-white silver gelatin prints prompt viewers to interrogate their place in humanity's shared narrative. Using the camera to create alternate worlds, she transforms the everyday suburban landscapes where she photographs into powerful visual metaphors that convey a reverence for the natural world. Through lyricism and metaphor, she creates images that reflect the tension between humanity and the natural environment that exists in our daily lives. Straus has exhibited her work at Villa Heike, Red 225, COOP Gallery, Cë Gallery, SITE Santa Fe, ElZaguan Santa Fe Historical Society, and more.

Hannah Jun Langer was born in Anhui, China, and raised in Massachusetts after being adopted as a baby. She earned an MFA with a concentration in ceramics from the University of Tennessee. Borrowing from nature, her work takes inspiration from life found on the ocean floor to explore her identity as an Asian American adoptee. Through sculpture and installation, the artist desires to build connection to land and community. Like the stories of adoptees, each sculpture’s story is only fully told when you take the time to look slowly and dig deeper. Langer has had several exhibitions, including a solo show at COOP Gallery and an upcoming show at Arrowmont Gallery. She has held several residencies and internships, including at the Cub Creek Foundation, Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, and Starworks.

Lucas Eytchison is a photographer from Nashville, Tennessee, based in New York. He earned an MFA from the University of Georgia and a BA from Lipscomb University. His practice centers on long-form photographic projects that explore landscape, perception, and masculinity. Through subjects ranging from the opacity of life and death to the abstraction of the human body and the natural landscape, Eytchison examines the complex relationships between human and non-human worlds. His work has been published internationally in Die Zeit, ZEITmagazin, Respekt Mag, The Atlanta Center for Photography, and Sunnyside Projects, and exhibited at The Athenaeum, Bridge Gallery, Random Sample; among others.

Mouminatou Thiaw is a Senegalese American artist born in Dakar, Senegal, currently living and working in Nashville, TN. She earned her BA from Scripps College. She explores closeness with the earth, grief, faith, migration, isolation, connectivity and organic life in her works to develop Africanist and Womanist iconographies for storytelling. With painting, collage, printmaking, and sculpture, she pulls from corporeal connection and memory to respond to both her internal and external worlds. Informed by her curatorial scholarship, Thiaw regards creative exploration and art literacy as central to critical and hopeful thinking about representations of race, identity, the body, and the earth. She has exhibited at Venice Biennale, The Forge, Country Music Hall of Fame; among many others.