Elemental Impressions of Interspecies Care, of Violence

ACRE Projects presents D Rosen: Elemental Impressions of Interspecies Care, of Violence, a solo exhibition exploring non-human animals’ entanglements with human agricultural and domestication practices. Rosen’s cast metal sculptures preserve the ephemeral, materially archiving the methodical activities of Dogs and non-human animals living on farms, and highlighting the enmeshment of care and violence within domestic spaces. In documenting collaborative rituals of care between human and non-human animals – the removal of hazardous material from a Dog’s mouth, the grooming of a pregnant Horse – Rosen rejects historically-rooted power dynamics, reexamining binaries in service of the cultivation of queer ecologies.

Furthering the breakdown of conceptual human and non-human animal divides, Rosen uses metal to record care work and interspecies relations. Typically associated with human industry and innovation, metal is a varied and agential material in itself that is also vital to human and non-human animals alike. The metal plow a Horse or Steer would have pulled to tend crops is now the artist’s chosen method to advocate for human-animal collaboration and care. In reappropriating a material used by humans for violence and forced labor into one that preserves gestures of kinship, Rosen demonstrates matter’s ability to hold a multiplicity of meaning. Building on the tactility of metal, Rosen creates artwork that invites a multisensory experience, using sight, touch, and scent to elicit memories of non-human and human audiences within Elemental Impressions of Interspecies Care, of Violence. Here, Rosen’s sculptural snapshots of the lives of Goats, Horses, and Dogs remind us to respect and nurture interspecies relationships, striving towards comfortable, ethical life cycles for non-human animals beyond the monetary or efficiency benefits they offer us.

We invite you to join us for the opening reception of D Rosen: Elemental Impressions of Interspecies Care, of Violence on Friday, August 23 from 6-9pm or during gallery open hours on Mondays and Wednesdays from 12-4pm and by appointment.

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The support of friends and collaborators, both human and non-human, helps bring this work into being. Thank you to the following beings for contributing in some capacity to this work and show from 2019 to 2024:

Esther, Honey, Scout, Cici, Danse, Donna, Eydis, Eyjalin, Elva, Elska; GlennArt Farm, Storlykkja gård, ACRE Projects, DCASE, Chicago Crucible, HF Group; Jason Raynard, Luin Joy Sherman, Kate Bowen, Lauren Leving, Mattea Sklut, Meg T. Noe, Marcela Torres, Mel Cook, Lloyd Mandelbaum, Nina Paroff, Valerie Carberry, April Sheridan, Ben Driggs, Ruyoi Shi, and Paul Erschen.