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Image shows the exhibition set up for Erotic Ecologies. The studio exhibition walls are painted all black, the light is dimmed, and the set up is backlit with a LED light fixture. On the left wall, there is a shelf installed with zines on top. The set up is a plaster sculpture of a hole suspended on clear acrylic rods. It is surrounded by 4 monitors on the top of poles. The monitors are angled looking into the hole. The sculpture and monitors are all held in place with an elevated black wooden platform

Erotic Ecologies

Jenna John

Plaster sculpture suspended on clear acrylic rods and 4 monitors mounted on steel poles on a wooden base, 2022

Undergraduate
Erotic Ecologies is an interdisciplinary performance, romance, and celebration of bodily collisions involving a hole and ecological study of soil, plant communities, and animal inhabitants within a 15 by 15 meter plot of a forested ecosystem. In building a relationship with this place, I brought together scientific inquiry and artistic expression through a research-based creative practice in order to explore how we understand, see, and interact with the non-human world. The exhibition for Erotic Ecologies accumulated in a sculptural video installation of the hole that reveals animal collaborators and eroticism in the ecological study of a landscape. There is also a zine with collected writing and images telling part of the story of how I fell in love with this hole. The exhibition and this writing commemorate my creative process, unfolding relationship with a hole, and the erotic discoveries in the meeting of bodies. All together, Erotic Ecologies is a lifelong creative practice that facilitates a synergistic meeting place for art and ecology to reveal new ways of being and relating beyond the Anthropocene.