Join us for a “First Friday” opening of the new exhibition series “Landscape & Life,” in Indexical’s studio space at the Tannery Arts Center. This first exhibition features new work by LA-based artists Paige Emery and Suzy Poling (aka Pod Blotz), and will feature sound and performances by both artists throughout the exhibition’s run.

Paige Emery

Paige Emery is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the ecological body and interactions between the internal and external landscape. An embodied gardener and environmental activist, she has a daily practice of working with plants and nonhumans.

She is Co-Director at activist and theory group, The Future Left, a researcher at New Centre for Research & Practice, and she received her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from Laguna College of Art & Design.

She currently inhabits Tongva Land in Los Angeles, California.

Suzy Poling

Suzy Poling is a polymath and interdisciplinary artist working with sound, video, film, photography installation, sculpture, painting, collage, and performance art. She researches the multi-dimensional interferences between optics, mirrors, sonic resonance, electrical synthesis, video experiments, human/alien identities, and inspections of geological anomalies. Pod Blotz is Polingʼs Modern Electronic/Sound Art solo muiscal project that explores posthumanist concepts, cathartic gestures, and otherworldly sound sources signed to Dais Records. This musical project began in 2002 and has released over 25 cassette and vinyl releases and has toured the US for years. Sonically, they have performed at the Recombinant Media Labs Festival, Hospital Productions Festival, Contemporary Jewish Museum, Colour out of Space Festival, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Yerba Beuna Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum, Human Resources, The LAB, and Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts. Pod Blotz has made releases with Dais Records, L.I.E.S. Chocolate Monk (UK), Nostilevo (LA), Conjunto Vacio(Spain), Clan Destine Records (UK), and Dungeon Taxis (NZ/NYC), and more. Visually, Polingʼs artwork has been seen in The New York Times, Harperʼs Magazine, Dazed Digital, and a Metropolitan Museum of Art Book. Poling is a recipient of the Mike Kelley Foundation Grant and was a nominee for the SECA Award at the SFMOMA and has had 8 solo art exhibitions in Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco. Visually, her work has been exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Spring Break Art Fair, Southern Exposure, Disjecta, Cal Polytechnic University, Chicago Cultural Center, Australian Center for Photography, Aperture Foundation, Cult Exhibitions/Aimee Friberg and Zg Gallery. Poling is from Michigan, studied at Columbia College in Chicago, lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for almost a decade and now resides in Los Angeles.

Landscape & Life

What are the antinomies of landscape and life? The juxtaposition of the word “landscape” against “life” is an attempt to force our recognition of the ways in which the former is not guaranteed to be inclusive of the latter. In fact, the concept of landscape has historically been mobilized to deny the existence, agency and rights of those lifeforms which have inhabited the spaces designated as landscapes. This exhibition series is a rebuttal against this terra nullian framework which has insisted upon the lifelessness of land. Such thinking has allowed for practices of extraction, dispossession and ruination that continues to shape our lives today. In contrast, the artists participating in this series draw our attention to the imminence of life within the landscape, making visible and audible the presence of human and non-human vitality in what in art, geography and law has too often been represented as empty space. Each of the artists accomplish this using visual, aural and conceptual techniques, while also drawing into their work an aesthetics of relationality and social collaboration. In addition to three exhibitions over the 2021-2022 season, Landscape & Life will explore these concerns through public talks, performances and workshops. The exhibition series will be archived online and in a publication produced after its conclusion.

This series is curated by Gabriel Saloman, and features exhibitions by Paige Emery & Suzy Poling (Oct/Nov 2021), Raven Chacon (Jan/Feb 2022), and Paul Walde (Apr/May 2022).