Rian Ciela Hammond: r00tpicker

Friday, September 24, 2021 – Sunday, October 31, 2021
Presented as Part of Future Ecologies

About the Artwork

Rian Ciela Hammond, r00tpicker, 2021
single channel video, RunTime: 8min 5sec

r00tpicker is a queer nature documentary and video essay combining footage of wild yams thriving in loving multi-species constellations, with animated scientific diagrams, and narration performed by Gabriela Cordoba Vivas. The animated interface is made up of scientific/industrial maps of molecular and enzymatic interactions that produce chemicals found in plants called phytosterols, and their transformation into more familiar molecules like testosterone and estrogen.

The work celebrates the queerness of these molecules that are produced in our bodies as well as the bodies of people across species divisions: plants, bacteria, birds, fish, mammals etc. The narration flirts with the third person omniscient voice of the nature documentarian, weaving through trans feelings, and unwinding some of the colonial formations that have coalesced around these hormonal molecular gifts.

About the Artist

Artist and biologist Rian Ciela Hammond creates media-expansive artworks that invite people to examine the interactions between technology, power, and ways of knowing and being a body. Hammond’s work can be found in the online publication PUSH/PULL: Trans Family Archive (2020) and has been exhibited at El Museo, Buffalo, NY (2020) and Gas Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2019). Hammond is based in Lenapehoking (Jersey City, NJ).
More Info: rianhammond.com / @amillionviruses