Please Save Our Earth!: How To Wear Out Climate Change
Friday, April 16, 2021 – Sunday, May 23, 2021
Featuring: Suldano Abdiruhman, Eppchez!, Quinha Faria, Aimee Lin, and Lane Speidel
Curated by 2020 Black Box Curatorial Fellow Sarah Kim
Presented in Commons Space
Watch the Closing Reception Runway Presentation!
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Please Save Our Earth!: How To Wear Out Climate Change is a series of workshops and an exhibition featuring five queer, trans, and/or POC artists and designers in Philadelphia who create sustainably: Suldano Abdiruhman, Eppchez!, Quinha Faria, Aimee Lin, and Lane Speidel. The exhibition considers the relationship between fashion, climate change, historical garment traditions, and marginalized communities.
Suldano Abdiruhman will present textiles and garments that are the results of her experiments with natural dye and reclaimed materials. Interested in what grows locally and plentifully, Abdiruhman works with weeds and other plant matter that grows wild around her neighborhood, gathering materials during foraging walks.
Through Kombucha leather, plarn (plastic yarn), and whimsical darning, Eppchez! weaves together the natural and the artificial, the ancestral and the inventive, in order to create sustainable clothing solutions for trans people.
Halfway to the Cosmos (2021), an installation by Aimee Lin, is a meeting of six characters who collectively reinvent their narratives to survive the end of the world. Drawing knowledge from Tarot cards, Jungian archetypes, RPG tropes, and mythology, these characters’ embodiment of curiosity, harmony, possibility, community, wonder, and intention, are translated into 11 sets of piece-worked and intuitively patterned garments and objects.
In her work Supply & Demand (2021), Quinha Faria examines excess and growth, drawing attention to the deceitful eco-friendly marketing of sustainable fashion brands with her towering figures covered head-to-toe in polyester deadstock, or presumably “surplus” fabric. Polyester, the most commonly produced fiber in the world has toxic environmental impacts and serious health implications for workers and wearers of this petroleum-based fabric.
And, The Stars Are Free (2021) by Lane Speidel consists of a cape, vest-top, and jeans made from cyanotype-printed cotton and re-purposed flannel and denim. Made from old clothes and biodegradable cotton, Speidel designed their work to reflect the sky in a world with less electricity and light pollution, and more stars, inspired by “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler.
In the spirit of recycling, Philadelphia artist Mollie Caffey has lent additional archival works clouds i, ii to this exhibition. Their works are characterized by poetic and spiritual interpretation of nature, in line with the eco-centric themes of this show.
There will also be a standing clothing swap for the duration of the exhibit that visitors are invited to contribute to and take from. The swap operates both as a visible measure of waste that grows out of fashion capitalism and as a site of community exchange. All remaining clothing will be donated to organizations around the city or recycled as best as possible.
Read Curator Sarah Kim’s Extended Curatorial Statement & Learn More About Please Save Our Earth!
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Suldano Abdiruhman is an interdisciplinary artist, maker and organizer raised in Baltimore, MD and based in West Philadelphia. Formally trained in fiber and graphic design, her work is primarily concerned with the cross-cultural use of textiles as a form of communication, meditation, protection, and marker of time. Her work has been shown at Spillway Collective, the Walters Museum of Art, Platform Gallery, the Peale Museum, Oak Hill Center for Education and Culture, the Penthouse Gallery, and in various online exhibitions. She is a member of the artist collective BALTI GURLS, a Black feminist collective aimed at creating platforms and spaces for women of color in the artist and music industries, and the co-founder of holsol studio. She is also an avid listener, intermittent gardener, and experimental home cook.
More Info: suldanoa.com / @suldanoa / @ziplockshorty
Eppchez! is a Quaker, Cuban & Jewish performer and innovator committed to stewardship and equity through human-centered artistic and economic practices. In 2017 Eppchez began designing non-phallic packers to further conversations around gender expansive self-determination. Ey calls this trans-empowerment project Darb Garb. Ey received support from The Leeway Foundation and NextFAB to learn more about the sartorial design needs of trans people and develop materials and strategy for solving them. Eppchez has always preferred to get clothes second hand and alter or mend them. In designing new garments ey is committed to using materials that have a low environmental impact or would otherwise end up in a landfill.
More Info: almasengine.com / darbgarb.com / @eppchez / @darb.garb
Aimee Lin is an artist, educator, and explorer living on occupied Lenape Land, in West Philadelphia. Their Sagittarian desire for constant exploration fuels their current research in dreamwork, nomadic architecture, performative garments, semiotics, and a plethora of esoteric resources. They are meticulously cataloging a Cosmic Library, a composition of peripheral sounds, intuitive objects, and communal actions, all woven together. Collecting, building, weaving, and listening, they relish in the nuances of tangles, deliberate and chance. Research began in their childhood: moments of leisure were spent collecting rocks, exploring the nonlinear, and recreating dreams. Now, they investigate collective histories, alternative paradigms, pedagogical exchanges, and in search of resonance.
More Info: aimeeaimeeaimee.com / @aimeeaimeeaimee
Quinha Faria is a Brazilian-American artist, ER nurse, and a student of master tailor Larnell Baldwin. She is the creative director of Philadelphia Packaging Company, a collective of friends who recently released “A Phonebook” — a multilingual, free, print publication featuring small business owners across the city. This summer, Faria will pursue her MFA in painting at Bard.
More Info: eriquinha.com / @quinha.etc
Lane Speidel is a white, trans, non-binary, queer artist with invisible disabilities. They are an artist member of Vox Populi, a graduate of Tyler School of Art, and a preschool teacher. Their work consists of sculpture, writing, movement, music, and fiber-work. They are interested in surviving to communally created imagined queer futures in which we are all free.
More Info: ihopeilikethis.com / @body_joke
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Sarah Kim (they/them) is an artist, critic and event organizer. They work towards supporting marginalized voices in the arts and divesting art and art-adjacent spheres from white supremacy. Currently, they are reflecting on ways to merge eco-activism with creative practice. They are from the Los Angeles area and have been living in West Philadelphia since 2014.
More Info: @sa__a__a / @pa4lms
CURATOR ACKNOLWEDGEMENTS
Sarah Kim would like to thank the following individuals for their contributions to Please Save Our Earth!
Vox Populi:
Danny Orendorff, Blanche Brown, Maddie Hewitt, Jim Strong, Natalie Hutchings, Melissa Langer
Panel:
Kimberley McGlonn (Grant Blvd), Kirsty Robertson (Synthetic Collective), Lucia Albers
Workshops:
Serena Hocharoen, Katie Kaplan, Vivien Wise, Olivia Caro (Soapbox)
Artists:
Suldano Abdiruhman, Eppchez!, Quinha Faria, Aimee Lin, Lane Speidel, Mollie Caffey
Graphic Design:
Serena Hocharoen
Music:
Kira Rodriguez
Venues:
Rail Park, Viaduct Space
Special thanks to:
Leeway Foundation
Additional thanks to:
Noel Puello, NaaAmerley Badger, Corey Ridgeway, Naomi A. Brito, Amy June, Larnell Baldwin, Maryam April Pugh, Jungmok Yi, Kyla Van Buren, Carrie Ford, Britney Rodriguez, Fritz Habekuß, Jori Blouin, Jasmine Chang, Stephanie Bursese, Kaitlin Pomerantz, Sunyong Choi Kim & Sungho Kim, Television
This project is supported in part by the Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant.