Ecological Kinship Makes Scents with Jake Eshelman
Ecological Kinship Makes Scents with Jake Eshelman
Join us via Zoom Wednesday, April 30th, 7 pm EDT
The ecological underpinning of scent enables us to access a vastly more dynamic, interesting, and inclusive sense of our own (intra)personal identity. Join us this week as photo-based artist and visual researcher Jake Eshelman considers scent as both a creative medium and an ecological language. His talk begins in the heart of the Costa Rican rainforest, where he will share his experiences and fieldwork with one of nature’s original perfumers: orchid bees. From here, Jake will offer us a glimpse into his creative practice, where he has recently begun exploring how olfaction can be the aesthetic and ecological power to build more intimate interspecies relationships—inviting us to reach beyond our haptic limitations to touch and meld with what we can’t quite grasp with our fingers: air, water, spores, sex, growth, death, decay—situating us and our photographic practice within the gushing lifeblood of ecology.
Please join us for a dynamic conversation as we continue to explore the element of air as the transport medium that stimulates a multitude of sensations, emotions, and images. Together we will considered how smell impacts your sense of kinship with the natural world, and how that changes the way we see, feel and make photographs.
Jake Eshelman is an artist and visual researcher exploring the complex relationships between people, our environment, and everyone we share it with. Through both work and leisure, he’s particularly interested in troubling the notion that humanity is somehow separate from—or superior to—the natural world.
Jake thoroughly enjoys writing and speaking about his creative and conceptual interests. To date, he has lectured at institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of Houston, and has also published work through National Geographic, Simon & Schuster, and Sophia Centre Press, among others. He is also currently pursuing his MA in Ecology & Spirituality through the University of Wales, Trinity St. David.
Jake Eshelman has also exhibited his work internationally, most notably at Vantaa Art Museum Artsi in Helsinki, Finland; The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge University; Rhode Island School of Design; Contemporary Calgary, and Houston Center for Photography.
