Artist: Erin Jane Nelson
Exhibition title: One Entanglement, Under Clouds
Venue: MOCA GA, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Georgia, US
Date: August 7 – October 2, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and MOCA GA
“We are losing frogs at an alarming rate. The chytrid fungus is the likeliest culprit, an invisible and mostly undetectable spore that has been sprinkled across continents, accelerated by global trade and the unfettered circulation of human goods and bodies. In the wake of this fungal rampage are hundreds of small extinctions. I’ve known about the frog fungal epidemic for a while, but I have been stewing about it more deeply now that I innately know what it feels like to fear a microbe on a species-wide level. Have the frogs been an alarm bell this whole time? On my favorite gardening show, I watched Prince Charles plead with the British public to care about biosecurity, to preserve and protect, and imagine that a great entangling hasn’t already happened. How funny. The royal prince of the empire of colonialism—of going throughout the world, stealing, and then taking back to England to hoard—is now asking his subjects to do the exact opposite in a paternalistic, frustratingly unaccountable tone.
Although I fear the entanglement and its implications for health, for ecosystems, I also love the way invasive species digest and decompose national borders, cultural specificities, the illusion of neat categories. They require us to care about lands and water, to weed and dig up, to squash beetles between our fingers, to wipe down the plants leaf by leaf with soap. But the fungus is still killing the frogs. Or maybe we can think of it as challenging the frog to reimagine its body in the evolutionary long term to fight the fungus. I won’t see what frogs might become in my lifetime, but I want to imagine that they will metamorphize into a new form of frog-ness, in defiance of the spores, in defiance of us.
There are three frogs in this show, modeled on the pagan Triple Goddess. There is a maiden frog, a mother frog, and a crone frog. Right now, I would be in the mother frog stage of my own life, but I am not a mother, and I have no desire to be. So where does this leave me? Perhaps I am like the frog itself, fated to adapt to new ways of being, destined to mutate my body to live in the world on my own terms. This exhibition is a meditation on the lifecycle, of moving from one stage to another while denying the rites of passage one phase requires. A life becoming weirded and warped and beautiful and fraught because of it. Inevitably meditating on a lifecycle is also about imagining the decades to come. What could our world look like when I become crone frog? I want to imagine that the frenetic, entangled collapse of our planet could unfold into a thousand possible adaptive futures. Ribbet, ribbet.”
–Erin Jane Nelson
Erin Jane Nelson is an Atlanta-based artist and writer who received her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2011. She will be included in the forthcoming 2021 New Museum Triennial: Hard Water Soft Stone in New York this October. Her work has recently been exhibited in Making Knowing: Craft in Art 1950-2019 and Between the Waters at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Other.Worldly at the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, and Photography Today: Public Private Relations at Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. She has had solo shows at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Chapter (NYC), and DOCUMENT (Chicago). Nelson is a 2020 recipient of the Rabkin Award for Arts Journalism. Her work is included in numerous institutional and public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art (USA), the Fries Museum (NL), and KADIST (USA), and has been featured in publications such as Frieze Magazine, Cultured Magazine, The New York Times’ T Magazine, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Chicago Tribune, and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles.
MOCA GA’s Working Artist Project (WAP) was developed to support of mid -career or established artists in the Metropolitan Atlanta area. The program is funded by the Charles Loridans Foundation, the Antinori Foundation, and the AEC with additional funding provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. There are a total of 42 fellows over the last 14 years. As a museum that is dedicated first and foremost to supporting Georgia’s contemporary artists, it is MOCA GA’s goal to encourage these artists to remain in our city to establish Atlanta as one of the best cities for launching a viable career in the arts.
“This legacy initiative provides an unparalleled level of support for individual artists, expands the Museum’s mission, and promotes Atlanta as a city where artists can live, work, and thrive. MOCA GA supports artists by granting a major stipend to create new work; by presenting a solo exhibition of the new work; by producing an accompanying exhibition catalogue; and by providing paid studio apprentices over the course of one year,” —Annette Cone-Skelton, Director of MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, One Entanglement, Under Clouds, 2021. exhibition view, MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, One Entanglement, Under Clouds, 2021. exhibition view, MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, One Entanglement, Under Clouds, 2021. exhibition view, MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, One Entanglement, Under Clouds, 2021. exhibition view, MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, MotherFrog, 2021, Glazed stoneware, pigment prints, chain, and powder coated steel, Courtesy of the artist and MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, MotherFrog, 2021, Glazed stoneware, pigment prints, chain, and powder coated steel, Courtesy of the artist and MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, MaidenFrog, 2021, Glazed stoneware, pigment prints, chain, and powder coated steel, Courtesy of the artist and MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, CroneFrog, 2021, Glazed stoneware, pigment prints, chain, and powder coated steel, Courtesy of the artist and MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, CroneFrog, 2021, Glazed stoneware, pigment prints, chain, and powder coated steel, Courtesy of the artist and MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, A Pit, A Place, Pigment prints, embroidery, and fabric on panel, Courtesy of the artist and MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, Daughter Pinwheel, 2020, Pigment prints, found fabric, and natural dyes on panel, Courtesy of the artist and MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, Daughter Pinwheel, 2020, Pigment prints, found fabric, and natural dyes on panel, Courtesy of the artist and MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, Rain Shadow, 2021, Pigment prints, hapa zome, and fabric on panel, Courtesy of the artist and MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, Understems, 2021, Color pencil, paper, offset print, brass, flower, silicone, and ecopoxy on glazed stoneware, Courtesy of the artist and MOCA GA
Erin Jane Nelson, The Word for World is Flower, 2021, Colored pencil, paper, shells, pigment print, pigment, and ecopoxy on glazed stoneware, Courtesy of the artist and MOCA GA
