Ecofeminism – Art Spiel

Dakota Gearhart grew up on a Florida coastline where algae blooms, sewage outflows, and bikini contests share the same shoreline, and her work has been carrying that mix of beauty, decay, and amusement into a much bigger frame ever since. Across animation, sculpture, performance, and sound, she builds video worlds where pixels sing, electricity becomes sentient, and the nonhuman shows up on equal footing with the rest of the cast. Her ongoing animated series Life Touching Life is hosted by Tiffany, a half-algae, half-woman figure who guides viewers through episodes shaped with collaborators — poets, scientists, activists, caretakers — whose lives already reflect the worldview the work is reaching toward. It’s funny, strange, and serious in roughly equal measure, which turns out to be the right register for the worlds it stages.

Born and raised in New York, Lacey McKinney is a New York-based fine artist whose work explores the tensions between interspecies dynamics, gender and ecology, the paradox of life and death, and bodily transformation and decay. Having exhibited nationally, received major grants such as the NYFA/NYSCA Project Grant, and completed residencies including the McColl Center, McKinney’s practice continues to evolve. Her work meditates on the complexities of existence, as self and in relation to others, unraveling the differences that separate us, and highlighting the interdependence entangled within all species, ecosystems, and identities.

McKinney’s gestural material application and stylistic dynamism merge, meld, reconfigure, and transform figures, flora, and fauna, creating liminal compositions that blur where form begins and ends. Her pigments and paints examine the relationship between predator and prey, a relationship that, though antagonistic, still relies on reciprocity to survive. Insides become outsides, differences become diffused, and touch becomes transformative.

Tag: Ecofeminism

Dakota Gearhart: All Matter Is Alive

Lacey McKinney: Where Bodies Blur