Martha’s Contemporary is pleased to announce Unseen Threads, a group exhibition of sculptures, paintings, video, and mixed media artworks which illuminate the beauty of the natural elements which evade our human sight and, all too often, appreciation.

What does the organ look like from which the spider draws her glittering, silken thread? What might these webs feel like from the perspective of the bark upon which they are laced? Unseen Threads seeks to shed light on the assets of even the smallest pieces of our natural world–from the billions of microbes in a gram of soil to the limestone fissures produced by subterranean waters. Large-scale ecosystems like lakes and forests or even the grasses which line our lawns are often treated as discrete entities, despite actually being composed of countless smaller structures and relationships, never static, and only separate from its surroundings to facilitate human understanding. The works in the exhibition approach the sutures of the world unseen–either often ignored or entirely unseeable to the human eye–from a scale that does not privilege the human position, but decenters it such that new understandings of beauty might be formed. Whether through subject, technique, or medium, each of the artists in Unseen Threads has taken up the role of the artist-as-translator: conjuring experiences of the natural world through a human perspective which is decentered, making more room for what we might learn from that which we call non-human.

Text by Lindsey Lascaux Photography by Andrea Calo

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

-Joyce Kilmer