August 2022 / Cumulative Skies, Deep Soils

Cumulative Skies, Deep Soils

by Erin Mallea and Jen Vaughn

August 04 – 27, 2022
Opening Reception / Thursday, August 04, 5–8pm

Summer/Covid-19 Gallery Hours:
Friday–Sunday, 12–5pm

Cumulative Skies, Deep Soils is an ongoing collaborative project between Jen Vaughn and Erin Mallea. The project began as a performative act of attempting to listen to the vibrations of an ancient rhizomatic network of fungus located in Oregon. Commonly known as the “Honey Fungus” it is estimated to be the largest living organism by area, covering 3.5 square miles at an estimated age of 8,650 years. Jen’s act of listening turned touch into sound, while thousands of miles away Erin repeatedly transmitted Jen’s recorded sounds and images throughout the atmosphere via SSTV, a form of image transmission via radio.

Cumulative Skies, Deep Soils is a rhizomatic installation of sounds, crystallizing spills, SSTV,
and stratified sculptural works formed from meteorites, debris, and mycelium. The project aims
at an expanded intimacy—a move towards contact despite distance, difference, and time. It explores the ineffable: time and physical scales beyond human perception. The artists’ actions thread together accumulations of decay with moments of the living, the cosmic, the future. Earth and sky are intertwined to generate closeness against the pace of separation between species.

Special thanks to Jeremy Klotz, the Carnegie Tech Radio Club W3VC, and Tyler Blensdorf for their generosity, support, and assistance with SSTV transmission and audio engineering.

ARTIST BIOS /

Erin Mallea
I am a multidisciplinary artist motivated by an attempt to better understand the spaces I inhabit. I explore the past and present of particular microcosms as metaphors for larger human and environmental conditions. Analytical, meandering, playful, and often public in nature, my work manifests in a range of media including video, sculpture, photography, performance, audio, writing, and participatory projects.

My work often collapses personal, natural, and national history to scrutinize systems of producing knowledge, place, and memory in the American landscape. I have explored specific logic systems including how a replica of a historic museum categorized objects, the internal struggle of a former utopian community to define itself, my grandmother’s attempt to understand family history, and a group of biologists’ concerns around the idea of “invasiveness”.

Erin is currently based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Jen Vaughn
As an interdisciplinary artist, my work uses a wide range of materials and processes to thread together my interests in geology, the environment, and the complexities of our cultural constructions of nature. Using sensory understanding as a way to both think and feel, I engage with long acts of looking and performative actions that seek to approach the current moment with curiosity, care, and a sense of responsibility for the spaces and beings around me. I celebrate and mourn the complex entanglements of these relationships, using my art practice to pose questions about our concept of place, ownership, and collective destiny.

Jen Vaughn is based in Eugene, Oregon. She is a member of Ditch Projects, Media Editor for the Center for Art Research and the Ford Family Foundation’s Critical Conversations, and an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at Western Oregon University.