Arsenal Gallery: ALTER ECO

NYC Parks presents the group exhibition ALTER ECO, featuring artists envisioning alternate realities to inspire environmental care. 

Using research, technology, and invention, these artists tackle one of the greatest issues facing climate activists: making people care beyond their lifetime. Works in this exhibition help facilitate an alternate experience of our environment, allowing for deeper connection across space and time.

The interactive work Tomorrow’s Sea, (2024) by Edrex Fontanilla and Sarah Nelson Wright, creates a virtual reality 'empathy machine' to foster connections between viewers and locations that are endangered by sea level rise. The scent-based work, a Garden with No Flowers, (2023) by Emma Gasterland Gustafsson, offers a glimpse into a far-off future devoid of all organic matter, where scientists attempt to resurrect the sense (and scents) of relaxation that ancient populations experienced when convening in community gardens.

Evgenia Emets' Eternal Forest project establishes forest sanctuaries as artworks for their protection. Emets’ text-based works help us grasp the time scale of an old growth forest sending us backward and forward 1000 years. In the Undiscovered City, (2019) series, Julia Oldham presents collaged futures for NYC sites inspired by interviews she conducted with NYC environmental stewards. At the same time, Oldham's narrative video, Dendrostalkers, (2022), imagines a world in which trees have evolved to transcend the three-dimensional world to escape destruction by humans.

This exhibition is FREE and open to the public. For more information, visit nyc.gov/parks/art. 

Image credit: Dendrostalkers (still from video), 2022 By Julia Oldham