A Plants
A Plants, included in INVENTED ARCHIVES with Mitsuko Brooks and Diana Sofia Lozano
Curated by Paula Burleigh
Allegheny College Art Galleries
January 24 - March 3, 2023
Invented Archives explores ways of knowing rooted in care, affect, and speculation. Artworks by Mitsuko Brooks, Angie Jennings, and Diana Sofia Lozano gesture toward shared knowledge among various kinship networks, human and beyond. Brooks’ intimate mail art collages and large-scale paintings picture dispatches of solidarity, messages which traverse long distances to foster community. Jennings’s paintings of plants traditionally used for contraception and pregnancy termination reflect knowledge shared among women and disempowered individuals, the details of whose lives were rarely recorded for archival posterity. Confounding botanical taxonomies rooted in Western Imperialism, Lozano’s hybrid flora—naturally occurring, genetically modified, and imagined—speculate on the desires of non-human species. With strategies ranging from recuperation of marginalized knowledge to speculation on the unknown, works by Brooks, Jennings, and Lozano allude to a corpus of knowledge that transcends boundaries between fact and fiction.
https://www.alleghenyartgalleries.com/invented-archives