Interdisciplinary artist Nancy Dayanne Valladares’ practice closely examines photography’s historical entanglement with botanical imaginaries and chemical legacies. In this talk, Nancy will present their ongoing research that traces plant agency in historical narratives of visuality. Her research departs from the relationship between plant matter, light, and technologies of vision and the photosynthetic worlds that unfold between them. Influenced by discourses on chemo-ethnography, critical plant studies, and speculative futures, her image-based practice delves into the formation of optical tools and their accompanying visual regimes. In addition to the topics above, we will discuss Nancy’s film The Density of Breath (2020). Shot with an electronic microscope, The Density of Breath is a meditation on vegetal agency, plant exchanges, and botanical representation.

Nancy Dayanne Valladares (b. 1991) completed her Bachelor in Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was recently a Fellow at Harvard University’s Film Studies Center, A Fialkow Fellow from the Transmedia Storytelling Initiative at MIT, and a resident at the Siftung Bauhaus Dessau. Her work has been exhibited and screened at Massachusett’s Institute of Technology, Sakiya (Palestine), Weisner Gallery, Chuquimarca Projects, Sullivan Galleries, Goethe Institute, Bauhaus Dessau, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Research House for Asian Art, and Roman Susan Gallery.

Organized by fields harrington.

This event is part of PRACTICING THE ENVIRONMENT, a virtual, public-facing event series with artists, curators, activists, and scholars across the world who explore and engage in various aspects of environmental concern. This series reconsiders the supposed distinction between humans and nature; it is a distinction that has impacted notions of cultivation and place, as well as our relationships with plants and with each other. Focusing on visual arts and performance-based projects that engage notions of environment, these events consider the ecological implications of the materials that we work with, as well as the environmental frameworks and atmospheres that we work within. Hosted by faculty from the Department of the Arts at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. All events are free and open to the public, but prior registration is required.

Zoom link will be sent in advance of the event.