Ferality in Nameless Realms

Curiouser & Curiouser presents, Ferality in Nameless Realms, a group exhibition guest-curated by Jenn Cacciola and SK Reed featuring twenty artists working across disciplines, half from the larger New York area and half from the Kansas City region. Cacciola, based in New York, and Reed based in Kansas, paired artists from their respective locations to share virtual studio visits and create small collaborative works with one another. These collaborations will be shared alongside solo work by each artist, giving the viewer a glimpse of the individual inclinations at play in the generative long-distance work.

The impetus of the project acknowledges that artists and curators are navigating a late-capitalist environment, where resources are constantly shifting and little can be predicted. In response, there is a need to follow our natural tendencies towards care and community-building, which often work against most profit-driven systems. The show’s title draws inspiration from Sara Swain’s essay, Feral Hospitality:

‘Feral Hospitality’ may initially seem like an oxymoron. Hospitality, after all, is associated with home, welcoming, and belonging. Feral, by contrast, conjures all that is unhomely, unwelcomed, and does not belong. From the Latin ‘fera’, meaning wild, it designates the ‘nature’ that we left behind in order to become human (92).

Feral-ness often connotes a negatively framed separation of humans from nature, whereas Swain suggests that in becoming “human,” or in trying to make a life for ourselves within a capitalist and colonial system, we have left behind parts of our natural selves that are rooted in communal care and desire for connection. This as a different type of hospitality that is activated outside the physical home, through meeting others in a co-inhabited space where certain dynamics of ownership can be absolved. Swain encourages, “We must design strategies to live together, making and remaking hospitable places, as they continue to be unmade.”

The long-distance work between the artists and curators of this exhibition suggests a complicated realm of togetherness necessary for navigating the instability of the present. The insistence on making community regardless of concepts of space ownership and belonging is reflected throughout the history of countless artist-led movements.

Featuring work by Adina Andrus, Sibley Barlow, Summer Brooks, Tiana Nanayo Kuʻuleialoha Honda, Ruth Jeyaveeran, Elena Kalkova, Hannah Lindo, Tristan Lindo, Garry Noland, Brittany Norgia, Elinore Noyes, Natalie Ortiz, Allison Panzironi, Heidi Schultz, Chico Sierra, Kirsten Taylor, Emily Teall, Miyuki Tsushima, Sarah Valeri, and Robert Zurer in the main gallery, and an installation by Mary Clara Hutchison (KS) and Patricia Miranda (NY) in the Container Gallery.