S.E. Nash

Krautsourcing

Nov. 14, 2019 – Feb. 26, 2020

Leaf tracings artwork

The Kniznick gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of Kansas City-based artist S.E. Nash. "Krautsourcing" is a socially engaged exhibition that continues the artist’s investigation into the collective and creative inventions of people and microbes. In his ongoing work with fermentation, Nash creates homages to fermented foods. The ferments are displayed in concert with sculptures, bubbling, changing color and revealing perceptual changes over time. The work raises ontological questions, exploring the gaps between living and nonliving, active and static, art and non-art.

For "Krautsourcing," Nash presents a series of sculptural and wall-based works that draw on the territories of the kitchen and the science lab as extensions of the studio and sites of knowledge production. “Krautsourcing” generates a space for working with microbes and for thinking through connections between the artist’s transgender experience, family history, fermentation practice and symbiotic existence. In this layered space, all organisms and atoms produce knowledge and subvert subject positions by engaging in a perpetual exchange.

In advance of the opening of "Krautsourcing," Nash invited people to participate by making their own sauerkraut, culminating in a performance of mixing and sharing the combined fermented vegetable krauts for the opening of the show. As we view the resulting collective kraut now on display, Nash asks us to consider our bodily entanglements, particularly with the bacteria that engendered life nearly four billion years ago.

Events

S.E. Nash | Performance Lecture

November 14, 2019

6–8 p.m.

Lecture at 6 p.m. (reception to follow)

S.E. Nash discusses his work and process in "Krautsourcing." During the reception, Nash combines jars of fermented sauerkraut brought through an open call for participation.

Lacto-Fermentation Workshop with S.E. Nash

February 8, 2020

1–3 p.m.

In conjunction with his solo exhibition "Krautsourcing" at the Kniznick Gallery, artist S.E. Nash (Sean Nash) will host a fermentation workshop for the campus community at Brandeis University. Sean is a food fermentation experimentalist who uses fermentation as a material and social medium in his artistic practice.

He studied with fermentation revivalist and author Sandor Katz in 2014 and began incorporating living fermented foods in his sculptures soon after. This workshop will go over the basics of lacto-fermentation, food preservation, and the microbiome, and will provide hands-on experience through a sauerkraut demonstration. In addition to discussing the fermentative processes of microbes, Sean will speak about his involvement in contemporary art and fermentation movements that use fermentation as a metaphor and model for self-empowerment.

In his published writing, Sean encourages us to think with our microbes, which comprise 50% to 80% of a human body’s cells. He proposes this as a paradigm shift for understanding sex and gender in concert with symbiosis. Each participant will receive a jar of sauerkraut.The workshop will conclude with a tour of "Krautsourcing."

Exercises for the Quiet Eye with Annie Storr

February 25, 2020

12:30-2 p.m.

WSRC Scholar, art historian and museum educator, Annie Storr leads art experiencing exercises through the Kniznick Gallery exhibition "Krautsourcing." Storr developed Exercises for the Quiet Eye (EQE) to encourage patient reflection, appreciation, and an attempt to avoid the rush to understand, or determine a set interpretation for what we see.
Drawing by S.E. Nash of cabbage and microbes

S.E. Nash, Cabbage Looper Leaf Tracings, 2019-ongoing. colored pencil on paper, 9" x 12" each

Triptych of three framed works with cabbage printsch of three framed works with cabbage prints

S.E. Nash, Making Kin (With Self and Other), 2019. repurposed wood from raised garden bed, laser engraved plywood, fabric, cabbage stains, acrylic paint, burlap, composite resin, colored pencil, 28 x 68 ¼ inches