Extraction: on the Margins
California Society of Printmakers Themed Portfolio Exchange
“Out on the margins … we live in a distorted mirror image of the center, which perceives our ‘nature’ as primarily resource. Here negative space can be more important than what’s constructed from its deported materials elsewhere.”
~ Lucy Lippard, Undermining
Our current cultural and political climate often encourages us to think of ourselves and our surroundings as commodities, to focus on maximizing what we can take from our lands, our selves, and each other. In Undermining, Lucy Lippard describes the effects of mineral extraction in the American West. She could just as easily be describing countless other interactions among people, or between people and our surroundings. The same kind of extraction and resulting alienation happens when the products of industrial agriculture are exported to distant lands, when tourism distorts the spaces and peoples it purports to honor, or when corporations monetize our labor, our attention, and our data.
Call for Participation:
This portfolio invites participants to consider the kinds of extraction in which we engage and their lasting effects on our sense of place and our sense of ourselves — what do we gain from mining all we can from the land? From each other? What forms do these extractions take? How are we enriched and how are we diminished?
For full prospectus, project details and submission form visit the CSP Submittable.
