Pachamama Collective

Charlotte Graham-Spouge, Sammi Drew and Gabriel Gooch Blanco

This exhibition aims to show three pieces of work that centre around the relationship between environment, climate change and gender. Just as our natural world is being progressively destroyed, we are challenging and expressing our own natures in new and unique ways. Each of these pieces engages and questions the relationship with the viewer, demanding more than a passive viewing of the work. By using hidden glitching techniques or collage, these images disrupt the usual path of viewing and deny visual resolution. They make intentionally uncomfortable viewing and hope to challenge received notions of gender and the environment.

Pachamama Collective is an emerging collective concerned with gender, queer and environmental issues. Named after the Incan Mother Earth goddess who exemplifies the gendering of nature, the collective actively engages audiences through participatory workshops and encourages everyone to consider how photography can make a difference.

Artist biography

Charlotte Graham-Spouge’s work, Post-photography; Post-climate, sees a parallel between the death of photography and the death of our climate. Her sublime, abstract seascapes utilise a form of glitching that expresses the unseen damage we create in our environment. In order to understand the work, the viewer must actively engage with it, as the code is displayed behind the image.

Sammi Drew’s work, The Disappearing Innocents of the World in Crisis, responds to the climate crisis as it links to the atrocities of the farming industry. More relevant than ever in this global pandemic, her work is concerned with the effects of farming on the environment, air, species, and human health through infectious diseases. She explores the fragmentation of animals in a unique and thought-provoking way. Using an eco-feminist ethic of care practice, she has created a project juxtaposing portraits of rescued farm animals, photograms of everyday objects and fragmented animal imagery. She uses cyanotypes throughout as an eco-friendly form of printing relying on the sun, water and her own physicality to produce each image.

Gabriel L. Gooch Blanco’s work, Retracing Eden, aims to challenge the gaze of the viewer and contemporary notions of masculinity. He uses collage and solarisation techniques to contest the homogenous archetype of the male body – through reconceptualising, referencing and appropriating the already proven depictions of the male gaze in academic painting and photography. Furthermore, his work resists against the homogenous male, by shifting the hard, defined and ready for action idealised male body to the soft, subtle and relaxed poses that are utilised to typically objectify the ‘female’ body.


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Photo Fringe Collectives Hub
Phoenix Art Space
Waterloo Place
Brighton
BN2 9NB
Map

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2 October–1 November

Thursday 13:00–17:00
Friday 13:00–17:00
Saturday 13:00–17:00
Sunday 13:00–17:00