Garden of Our Time: Vanishing Species, Imminent Communities   ​ This exhibition begins with a shared experience that cuts through our present moment: the disappearance of species from the earth and from our collective memory. The accelerating rate of biodiversity loss is having a profound impact on our ecosystems and our place within them. Shaped by the unprecedented climate crisis as its defining zeitgeist, the exhibition explores our relationship to the larger ecological sphere and our interdependence with the non-human world. What does it means to live together in a time of erasure—and how do we tell the story in the midst of an unfolding crisis, while holding a space for another future? In All Art is Ecological, Timothy Morton posits our time as an age of "mass extinction," in which human activity has ushered in an entirely new epoch. He urges us to move beyond the mindset that separates human from non-human, nature from culture—for as nature vanishes, so too does culture, and with it history and knowledge as they are inseparable. And by making the familiar strange, and the unfamiliar accessible, art can invite us to expand our awareness and facilitate a space for attunement. Artists as Facilitators/ Non-human Species as Collaborators Informed by the emergence of this epoch, the exhibition explores art as a site of gathering— artists often notice what is overlooked, and see connections through sustained attention and poetic imaginations. And poets guide us into the leap through their poetic imagination, between absence and presence, and illuminating what is yet to come. The ten artists here each take on the roles of translators, observers, and collaborators of the natural world, attending closely to non-human species and the phenomena that surround them. The works in this exhibit invites us to engage sensory modes of understanding than what is prescribed— here, the plants, scents, and seawater molecules, become collaborators of the artists rather than objects. The visual, sonic, poetic, and olfactory—all illuminating the invisible and formless dimensions of vanishing, and emerging potential futures. Through these collaborations, the works reveal the fragile and precarious landscapes of our rapidly changing environment, deepening our attunement to non-human species and their unseen phenomena.