Emergent Strategies / In Defense of Weeds
January 18 – March 1, 2025
New work by Kariann Fuqua
Opening reception: Saturday, January 18th, 3:00-6:00 PM
Gallery hours: Saturdays, 12:00-3:00 PM and by appointment
Americans wage relentless chemical warfare on soil each year, dousing lawns, gardens, and parks with 90 million pounds of herbicides and pesticides annually. These toxins rip through our bodies and ecosystems, all in service to an artificial construct: the perfect, manicured grass lawn, a relic of British aristocracy that flaunted wealth through perfectly controlled nature.
Kariann Fuqua is an artist who explores the connection between chaos and control in the natural world. In her upcoming exhibition Emergent Strategies: In Defense of Weeds at Stand4 Gallery in Brooklyn, Fuqua examines the juxtaposition between the idealized capitalist American lawn and the overgrown diversified pollinator yard.
Fuqua postulates that a green monoculture benefits no species but ourselves, while most American lawns sit unused. This human need to control the environment comes at a steep ecological cost. The extraction from the land primarily serves capitalism as people spend money and their future health by spraying chemicals to eliminate plants, which many consider weeds: wild plants growing where they are unwanted.
Through a year of patient observation, documentation, and research of the “weeds” that grow in her yard, she’s begun viewing them as teachers instead of trespassers. They are beneficial food sources for many species (ourselves included), add nutrients to and aerate soils, and diversify the ecosystem. So why do they remain so divisive? What might weeds teach us about mutual benefit or interdependence? Like the dandelion, can they be a sign of resilience, showing us a path forward through our rapidly expanding ecological crisis? To survive our constantly changing climate, weeds might offer insight into adaptability, resilience, regeneration, and hope for a future existence – if we are willing to notice.
The title of this exhibition is derived from the book Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Marie Brown. She defines Emergent Strategy as “how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.” This installation of drawings, photographs, and collected objects from one acre of land in Mississippi investigates the power of small actions and shifts in attention, changing the relationship with the land one plant at a time.
This opportunity is made possible through the Individual Artist Career Opportunity Grant, a program of South Arts and by The Puffin Foundation, Ltd.
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