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A very abridged history of plant migrations, 2020, Connie Zheng
mixed media on Yupo paper, 20” x 26”
My current body of work is organized around the histories and migrations of seeds, as well as the ways in which bio-matter embodies both humans’ hopes for survival and terrors of contamination and invasion. This is embodied in an ongoing video work, The Lonely Age , which traces rumors of magical seeds that have washed up on the shores of northern California, as well as a speculative seed catalog, Millennium Flowers Catalog, which contains snippets of speculative fiction and proposals for new seeds that sit at the intersections of the animal and the vegetal. This presentation also includes a new painting, We heard that the sky used to be a field of blue, which is a poetic and investigative archive of the local plant species — and their histories of migration — that have surrounded and provided material grounding for the artist over the course of 2020. A very abridged history of plant migrations is a mixed-media cartographic drawing (available as a downloadable poster or high-quality print for sale) that attempts to trace the origins — and migratory movements — of important food staples in the US over the past 500 years, highlighting the ways in which the violent history of colonization and globalization are embodied in the humble diasporic seed, and the ways in which agricultural and geopolitical history have always been intertwined.