Stinkhorn Light, 2022
mangrove, plaster, epoxy, slash pine rosin, wood, cement, LED bulb, wire, fabric
Epiphyte
Lee Pivnik
5 November - 17 December 2022Hi-Lo Press, Atlanta GA
Curated by Good Enough
Epiphyte
Parasite
Spinning in the half-light
groundwater sprite
cypress den (homesite)
leaf blight
yearning, longing—unfulfilled delight
Stinkhorn Light
old growth is a human right
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I read that Florida used to have orchids on every tree. I can picture it, the gumbo limbos, the oaks, the mahoganies, reaching towards each other, arms encased in bark, draped in fuzzy moss and speckled in seafoam green lichens. Amongst the airplants and the bromeliads were the orchids, the delicate strangers, anchoring themselves with tentacular roots that searched for cavities in the branches. Holding themselves —holding each other— towards the sky, sustaining themselves on sunbeams and mist. The trees would collect them. They’d trade them, sending pollinators to cultivate and disperse them amongst the canopy so that every tree could share in their gifts. And through this act, overtime, the insects and the orchids shaped each other, diversifying into hundreds of different shapes and colors to please the trees.
When more people moved here, they fell under the orchids spell. But bigger and clumsier than the bugs that loved them, people ripped them from the trees, carted them into buildings, shipped them north by rail. Without them, the barren forests no longer enchanted. Whole trees were chopped down, land cleared and planned into subdivisions named after the trees and plants and people that were removed for their development. Sorry, I’m loraxxing.
I’m from a city between two national parks, the expansive swampy “River of Grass” to the west, and Biscayne Bay with its seagrass meadows and urban corals on the east. Both ecosystems have been significantly engineered to create the Miami we know today. One drained, the other dredged, so that their hydrology, their biodiversity, and their ongoingness are threatened. The city itself is also famously a point of precarity.
My work takes inspiration from living systems and other species to imagine a future that is based on mutualistic relationships instead of extractive economies. Running through this exhibition is the idea of entanglement - the touching, changing, mutating relationships between species and landscapes. It is through these intimacies that worlds arise - worlds of decay and degradation, or verdant flourishing. I like to say I’m a sculptor because it gives me some small power in shaping the world, imagining and materializing different ways of living, or making, or inhabiting. Ultimately, I’m just looking for a way to continue dwelling in the only place I’ll ever know intergenerationally, by crafting ecological reciprocity.
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