Transecologies explores ways of relating to nature without assimilating

San Francisco, CA—February 19, 2019—California College of the Arts (CCA) presents Transecologies, an exhibition that brings together the work of three Bay Area-based transgender artists: Craig Calderwood, Nicki Green, and CCA graduate Jordan Reznick (MFA Photography / MA Visual & Critical Studies 2013).

Transecology is a concept that describes a way of relating to nature without assimilating into norms for bodily life dictated by heteronormative traditions, myths, and sciences. The trans body is often perceived as “unnatural”—either as an aberration, a monstrous anomaly, or an artificial construction of medical technological intervention. Instead, the works of Calderwood, Green, and Reznick describe the trans relationship to nature as one of both fact and imaginary, and show transgender life on earth to be deeply historical, radically propagative, and presently imperative.

Influenced by the writing of scholar Mat Fournier, the exhibition invites viewers to cross into an uncharted environment of art outside of norms. Green’s ceramic mushrooms grow themselves stubbornly and unstoppably, contaminating the gallery space with queer spores. Calderwood’s low craft textile paintings and sculptures use nature as the symbolic vehicle to disseminate trans histories. Reznick’s photographic portraits beckon the viewer into earthly spaces that are both familiar and peculiar. Across the works the repetition of forms, patterns and gestures compose an ecology that is at once natural and impossible.

About the Artists

Craig Calderwood is a self-taught artist whose obsessively intricate drawings and sculpture deal with trans/queer identity, biodiversity, and continued attempts to “normalize” desire. Maneuvering through non-verbal communication, Calderwood employs bright, intricate patterns of hidden (and sometimes blatant) symbolism in her work to portray complex narratives, from the highly personal to the fantasized. Calderwood has exhibited at SFAC Gallery, SOMArts, Root Division, and Los Angeles’ ONE Archive. Hailing from the San Joaquin Valley, they now live and work in San Francisco, CA.

Nicki Green is a transdisciplinary artist living and making work in the Bay Area. Originally from New England, she completed her BFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and her MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. Her work focuses on craft processes, and her sculptures, ritual objects and various flat works explore topics of history preservation, conceptual ornamentation and aesthetics of otherness. She is currently showing work about the intersections of transness and Jewish ritual in the Bay Area Now 8 triennial at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Jordan Reznick is a photographer and scholar living and working in San Francisco. They develop photographic projects within their own communities, working with the entangled agency and vulnerability of the photographer with their sitters. Their Queer Babes project has been exhibited widely, including at Aperture Gallery in New York, and Romer Young Gallery and Dickerman Prints in San Francisco. Reznick teaches photography practice, history and theory at San Francisco Art Institute and is completing a PhD in Visual Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz.