The annual Environment Art and Social Practice (EASP) Exhibition offers a glimpse into a world where art meets science. This year’s exhibition, opening on April 2 at the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, embraces the theme Cobija de Tripas or Gut Blanket and tries to map the body through art and research, raising questions about how human, nonhuman and environmental bodies exist in a state of perpetual negotiation with cultural and ecological forces.
The exhibition will include research-based, mixed media and performative art projects. These projects are the culmination of two years of work by the EASP MFA students who’ve worked to translate concerns for environmental and social justice into contemporary art practices through professional training combining project-based research, seminars, faculty mentorship, electives, visiting artists and peer critiques.
Along with the exhibition, which is free and open to the public, there will be two artists talks on April 9 and 23 for a peek into the brains of environmental artists and their inspirations. For a comprehensive list of programs, please visit the cohort’s website.
“For me art practice is environmental research when done with an open heart and mind,” says Ilia Dolgov, an EASP student who focuses on eco-poetics, experimental plant-growing, and more. “Art is not an aesthetic object or a political statement – it is a situation, a contingent encounter with something we collectively do not know about ourselves yet.”
Dolgov’s project is a miniature garden that is home to a baby tree frog, which he has spent years tending on his studio desk. Other works in the exhibition cover topics including Black and Indigenous justice and technofascism through the lens of ecology and environmental healing.
The goal of Cobija de Tripas is to break down the concept that “everything is connected” and display sometimes grotesque realities. “As a cohort, we explore how to stay truthful when inhabiting the disturbing relation: be it with dear one’s fragility, or with settler-colonized landscapes’ artificial scarcity and brutality, or a municipal green waste dumpsite,” says Dolgov.
But the message of the exhibition is far from doom and gloom, instead it offers bits of hope and finding ways to work together to get through pain and suffering. “Don’t be afraid, we can walk in here together,” says Dolgov. “If even one person will come closer to something they were avoiding, something essential, personally and collectively, it would be a life-bearing event.”
About the Artists
Jorge Palacios is an artist from Yanawana/San Antonio, Texas, with roots in Central Mexico. Trained as a glassblower and anthropologist, they make and theorize between the borderlands of South Texas and Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, contemplating technology, craft, and speculative utopias. They hold a B.F.A. in glass from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), a BS in astrophysics from Brown University, and an M.A. in social sciences from University of Chicago.
Jonas Banta is a photographer, a friend, and a member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. He was born and raised in Degheyay’ Kaq, also known as Anchorage, Alaska, and holds a B.A. in Indigenous Environments and a minor in Studio Art from Pitzer College. Jonas is often found listening to birds or by the water.
Robert Johnson III is an artist and photographer whose work explores Black cultural identity, community, and the concept of home. Through his family archive, he reframes Black identity to examine how Blackness has survived in America, evolved, and reinvented itself—often in the face of historical inequities and systemic injustices. This body of work is not only a meditation on his family’s legacy, but also a broader reflection on the lived experiences of Black Americans—past, present and future.
Ilia Dolgov is a gardener, artist and writer; born in 1984 in Voronezh, Russia. He lived and worked in Saint Petersburg before leaving the country in 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Ilia holds an M.A. in Psychology from Voronezh State University and a New Artistic Strategies certificate from the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art.
Alberto Miguel is a Chicano folk performance artist. Born in Twentynine Palms, CA, to first-generation Mexican-American military parents, he earned his B.A. in visual and public art from CSU Monterey Bay in 2020.
Fernanda Rappa is a Brazilian artist with a background in photography. Since moving from the city of São Paulo to a rural area in 2017, she has been growing her relationship with the land and learning regenerative practices of agriculture as well as working with cultivating internal forests. Rappa’s artistic practice is centered on entanglements of bodies, ecologies, ways of knowing and belonging, using site-based research, local stories, and more than human languages.
Kate Jaffe is a spinster, weaver and educator. Her hobbies include: medicine making, book making, drinking tea, boiling dye mushrooms, gathering natural pigments, watching ducks, holding newts, saving seeds, sitting close to dogs and eating persimmons. She holds a B.A. in ethnobotany and natural history from UC Santa Cruz. Her works incorporate wool, horse hair, goat skin, photography and prose.
More Information
April 2 – May 3, 2025
12:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Website: https://sesnongalleries.ucsc.edu/
April 9 and 23
5:00 PM
Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery
UC Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, California 95064
Free and open to the public.
