John P. Hastings & Ben Mayock premiere a new work, Traces, in conjunction with their new exhibition being installed in the River St. facing windows of Indexical's space at the Tannery Arts Center. Traces is a meditation on the Southern American landscape and how those lands affect its inhabitants. Through a three-channel video installation, hanging sculptures, analog photography, and documentary interviews Hastings and Mayock tell the story of a landscape and its inhabitants. Hastings and Mayock are based in New York City and Vermont, respectively.

Olivia Ronan presents subversive topiary, a new work using collected fallen branches (sticks) and movement. subversive topiary actively entangles improvisation, haptic movement, and ecology. It is directed by the present moment as well as the aftermath and afterlife of trees. Ronan is based in Santa Cruz.

Traces is a meditation on the Southern American landscape and how those lands affect its inhabitants. The installation and performance focuses on three separate, but connected, time streams and peoples: pre-contact Native Americans as represented by the Mound building cultures; the colonial-era, as seen through the eyes of doomed explorer Meriweather Lewis; and the 20th century, particularly during the Civil Rights era. 

The land itself is a character in this drama: the fertile ground known as the Black Belt Prairie is a place for humans to congregate, utilize, and eventually foul. The Natchez Trace, an ancient through line in the landscape, is the pathway for this journey.

The work manifests as a three channel video projection, a hanging sculpture, a series of photographs, and an audio work. As a performance, all of the elements are linked through sound and text, moving seamlessly through time. The video projections focus on landscape, maps, and ephemera with connective images and motifs running throughout. The audio collage includes interviews, field recordings, and music written specifically for the project. The photographs, taken by Rolleiflex camera, showcase ephemera taken during trips to the area. The hanging sculpture displays collected objects, a microcosm of the entire project.

John P. Hastings and Benjamin Mayock are artists and musicians from New York and Vermont respectively. They focus their work on the environment, ecology, and the historical record. They have been working on a collaborative project, the New Cartography, for over 5 years, exploring the American landscape.

subversive topiary actively entangles improvisation, haptic movement, and ecology. It is directed by the present moment as well as the aftermath and afterlife of trees.

It is formed in response to tree mortality, deforestation, flooding and a search for renewal along the San Lorenzo River floodplain . In picking up sticks the body and corresponding movements and sounds are shaped and scored by sticks, blurring and obscuring the line between person, place, thing, tool, and instrument. The repercussions of haptic movement becoming percussion mixed with field recordings. A laborious, cyclical on-the-point-of-collapse-sculpture drifting between maintenance and disasssemblage . You are invited to engage in the process of gathering from many different vantage points; as a futile labor, improvised score, a moving meditation and an open ended discourse questioning understandings of topos—i.e., place.

Olivia Ronan is a Canadian born artist who grew up living in the United States. She spent the first 15 years of life frequently relocating. Multiple moves and a transient upbringing taught her to find a sense of belonging in an ever evolving relationship with the ecology, specifically to plants. The larger motivation of her art practice is to reframe relationships between plants and people by exploring the ways we conflict and coexist with each other and the transience and rootedness of our interwoven life cycles. Her art practice currently exists in Santa Cruz, the unceded ancestral lands of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. She graduated from UCSC in 2019 with a BFA in Studio Art. She has completed Artist-In-Residencies with Vashon Artist Residency, Vashon Island WA ( Summer 2022), and The Sable Project Stockbridge VT (Fall 2022), and Winslow House Project, Vallejo CA (2023). In winter 2022 she was awarded the Arts Council Santa Cruz Cultivate Grant.