CALL FOR ART
Bodies and Borders: Ecologies of Consent
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
“The achievement of health is premised on the ability to control what enters and exits the body’s
borders.”
- Elvia Wilk
“Whether one is speaking of relating well with humans or nonhumans, in the variety of ways in which we relate ( sexually, intimately-but-not-sexually, as food, fuel or material 'resources'), we are talking about sustaining one another.”
- Kim TallBear
Bodies and Borders: Ecologies of Consent investigates the intersection of bodies, ecology, and agency through the lens of permeability and protection. Drawing from Elvia Wilk’s assertion that health hinges on the regulation of what enters and exits the body's borders, this exhibition explores how consent is navigated/ within biological, political, and ecological systems.
JUROR: Beverly Naidus
Beverly Naidus's art life has straddled the socially engaged margins of the art world, collaborations with activist groups, and community-based art projects. Much of her work deals with ecological and social issues that have adversely affected her and those around her. Remediation and reconstructive visions are key concepts that guide her work. Her primary forms are public installations, digital projects, and artist’s books that explicitly gather stories from visitors. She has shared her work in city streets, in alternative spaces, university galleries and major museums. Her work has been written about in many books and journals and has developed an international audience. After exciting chapters in New York City and Los Angeles, including fruitful periods in Minnesota, Halifax, Nova Scotia and western Massachusetts, she has made a home in the Pacific Northwest since 2003.
Naidus has taught art as a subversive activity at NYC museums, the Institute for Social Ecology, California State University, Long Beach, Goddard College, Hampshire College and Carleton College, and has led workshops all over the world, both in person and online. In 2020, she retired from UW Tacoma where, for 17 years, she had created and facilitated an innovative, interdisciplinary studio arts curriculum in art for social change and healing. She is the author of Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame (a book that is shifting studio arts curriculum around the world) and has written & published many essays on eco-art and social practice as well as a few works of speculative fiction. She is currently writing a book to help us creatively navigate these uncertain times.
For more info about Naidus, read her biography here.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Women Eco Artists Dialog (WEAD) in partnership with The 109 Gallery invites work that addresses the ethics of bodily autonomy, the fluidity of borders, and challenges rigid classifications of self and other. The exhibition invites viewers to consider how bodies; human, animal, vegetal, and microbial, are sites of negotiation, resistance, and transformation in an era of ecological precarity.
Open to performance art, 2D and 3D works, and work that addresses the theme and focus of Bodies and Borders: Ecologies of Consent. Open to individual artists and collectives.
The online exhibition will be published on WEAD's Kunstmatrix gallery, with an option of show in a physical exhibition at The 109 Gallery in Chickamauga, Georgia. There will be a published catalog of the exhibition, as well as artist talks, screenings, and other engagements (dates to be determined.)
Submission is free to WEAD members whose annual dues are paid by June 30. For artists who are not WEAD members, the submission fee is $45, which includes a year's membership to WEAD, and is due August 1, 2025.
Application deadline: June 30, 2025
Notification: By August 5th
Exhibit: October 1, 2025 to January 31, 2026
To apply, register for EntryThingy. Then, click on the title of the exhibition.
Here is the EntryThingy link for easy copy and pasting: www.entrythingy.com/d=weadartists.org?start=list