Echoes of the Earth at Bushwick Gallery

By Annie Lee / May 2025 / Official Press Release

In a world facing unprecedented environmental change, Echoes of the Earth invites audiences to reconsider their relationship with the living world. Opening May 1st at Bushwick Gallery, this vibrant and urgent group exhibition curated by Mekhi Deleon brings together an extraordinary roster of contemporary artists whose practices intertwine environmentalism, material storytelling, and emotional truth.

Through sculpture, painting, installation, and conceptual experimentation, Echoes of the Earth explores ecological grief, resilience, and the interconnectedness of all life forms. Each work speaks to the fragility of our ecosystems—and the profound possibilities for repair, remembrance, and reimagination.

Reclamation and Renewal: Meikle Gardner’s Anchoring Vision

At the conceptual center of Echoes of the Earth stands Meikle Gardner, whose works LemonJelly and Fragile offer a meditation on transformation through creative reclamation. By using discarded industrial materials—foam, cardboard, duct tape—Gardner elevates what has been cast aside into layered compositions pulsing with urgency, resilience, and poetry.

Gardner’s Reclamations series challenges notions of permanence, value, and environmental responsibility. His works are not merely about recycling but about resurrection—the insistence that even in what we discard, new stories, new lives, and new meanings can emerge. Gardner’s vision frames Echoes of the Earth as a call to see differently, to act differently, and to remember that beauty often grows from what is broken.

Art as Witness: Environmental Narratives

Erin Quinn’s monumental sculpture Dreams of Glacier National Park offers a participatory meditation on environmental loss, using recycled glass, crude oil, and plexiglass to evoke ecosystems on the brink. The precarious structure implicates viewers in the delicate and irreversible decisions shaping the future of the planet.

Gina Keatley presents Resurge Seam, a commanding diptych from her acclaimed Ash and Algae series. Through textured black surfaces and subtle green eruptions, Keatley captures the regenerative forces of nature—where destruction always carries within it the seeds of renewal. Her work embodies resilience and silent endurance, echoing the rhythms of volcanic and marine landscapes.

Steve McDonnell presents DEATH SPIRAL, a searing indictment of fracking and environmental exploitation. Constructed from frac sand and dirt, McDonnell’s textured surface captures the violent tension between human industry and the natural world’s fragile endurance.

Amy Suzuki’s installation Entangled Shorelines examines coastal resilience, weaving together phragmites, found plastics, and marine debris into hybrid, evolving landscapes that blur the line between damage and adaptation.

Memory, Ecology, and Emotional Terrain

Danninger Feng channels the delicate resilience of overlooked spaces in An Irregular Dream IV and Veins of Spring. Through shaped canvases and intimate brushwork, Feng offers a visual language that honors transience, vulnerability, and the quiet persistence of life.

Marle Adelman turns inward with Subatomic 18, a mixed media reflection on microscopic ecosystems and the unseen structures of matter, inviting viewers to dissolve into interconnected worlds at the cellular level.

West Foster’s linocut Ancestors Exalted connects environmental survival with cultural survival, honoring Afro-Jamaican heritage and resilience through layered botanical symbolism.

Korissa Frooman’s Hanging by Threads suspends memory, body, and material in midair. Her use of bioplastics, copper, and textile techniques questions how we preserve or lose the traces of ourselves and our environments.

Imagining Post-Human Futures

Tibor Matijas’s lush acrylic painting Death of AI imagines a future where the natural world reclaims and outlasts human technological excess. His surreal landscapes blend hope and mourning, beauty and decay.

Sohn Plenefisch memorializes vanished species with Birds of North America, a monumental mixed media work that offers a tactile elegy for ecosystems quietly disappearing.

Suh Youn Choo (Grace Choo) uses humor and surrealism in Home Planet: Earth, constructing a fragile emotional terrain from jelly, slime, mirrors, and snack foods. Her work blurs environmental grief with personal resilience.

AL’s Death at Different Scales confronts the ethics of invisibility, honoring microbial lives through delicate cyanotypes printed on eggshells. Her work asks: at what scale do we begin to mourn?

Featured Artists – Echoes of the Earth: Environmental Art

  • Erin Quinn (Sculptor & Environmental Artist) – Dreams of Glacier National Park reimagines climate collapse through participatory sculpture.

  • Steve McDonnell (Conceptual Painter & Land Artist) – DEATH SPIRAL critiques the destructive legacy of fracking with raw, elemental materials.

  • Amy Suzuki (Installation Artist & Designer) – Entangled Shorelines creates poetic coastal landscapes from invasive species and marine debris.

  • Danninger Feng (Painter & Multidisciplinary Artist) – An Irregular Dream IV and Veins of Spring capture emotional ecologies through ethereal brushwork.

  • Marle Adelman (Mixed Media Painter) – Subatomic 18 explores the unseen complexity of natural micro-worlds.

  • West Foster (Printmaker & Poet) – Ancestors Exalted honors Black ancestral memory and botanical survival

  • Korissa Frooman (Sculptor & Anti-disciplinary Artist) – Hanging by Threads stitches together material memory, bodily vulnerability, and environmental reflection.

  • Tibor Matijas (Acrylic Painter & Surrealist Visionary) – Death of AI depicts a future where nature reclaims the technological ruins of humanity.

  • Sohn Plenefisch (Mixed Media Painter & Scenic Artist) – Birds of North America offers a textured elegy for lost species.

  • Suh Youn Choo (Grace Choo) (Mixed Media Painter) – Home Planet: Earth creates surreal, emotive landscapes of environmental and emotional survival.

  • AL (Engineer, Technologist, Artist) – Death at Different Scales challenges viewers to mourn the unseen through experimental biological art.

  • Gina Keatley (Abstract Expressionist) – Resurge Seam celebrates resilience through elemental abstraction.

  • Meikle Gardner (Multidisciplinary Artist & Environmental Storyteller) – LemonJelly and Fragile transform discarded materials into powerful acts of creative reclamation.