Exhibitions

Bodies and Borders: Ecologies of Consent

Curatorial Statement: 

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.


“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 

“The achievement of health is premised on the ability to control what enters and exits the body’s borders.”

- Elvia Wilk

CALL FOR ARTISTS

Women Eco Artists Dialog (WEAD) in collaboration 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 for Applications April 15, 2025

Submission Deadline June 30, 2025

Exhibition October 1, 2025 - January 31, 2026

Open to performance art, 2D & 3D works, and work that addresses the theme and focus of Bodies and Borders: Ecologies of Consent. Open to individual artists and collectives.

Online Exhibition Published on our Kunstmatrix gallery page

Additional option to show in a Physical Exhibition at The 109 Gallery in Chickamauga, GA.

Published Catalog of Exhibition

Art & Science Panel: date TBD

Other Artist Talks | Film Screenings | And Engagements: dates TBD

Submission Fee

$Free for WEAD Members

$45.00 Non WEAD Members
This includes a one year membership with WEAD (Women Eco Artists Dialog) and has accompanying benefits, such as features, being a part of our membership Artists directory, Newsletter member highlights, and more.


WEAD (Women Eco Artists Dialog) requires that you be a paid WEAD member ($45 fee) in order to be eligible to be juried. Payment is due by August 1st.

Link To Apply & Submission Guidelines: EntryThingy

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.

faculty.washington.edu

Submission Detials

To learn more about Women Eco Artists Dialog visit their website weadartists.org

Artist Application

Applications on EntryThingy

Recommended Reading: Articles/Books/Quotes/Other:

Agard-Jones, Vanessa. “Bodies in the System.” Small Axe : A Journal of Criticism 17, no. 3 (2013): 182–192.


Chen, Mel Y. Animacies : Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.


Collins, Reiko Goto, and Timothy M. Collins. “Art and Living Things: The Ethical, Aesthetic Impulse.” Human-Environment Relations, Springer Netherlands, pp. 121–33, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2825-7_10.


Conley, Verena Andermatt. Ecopolitics : The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought. London ; Routledge, 1997.

Ferguson, Roderick A. “Of Sensual Matters: On Audre Lorde’s ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’ and ‘Uses of the Erotic.’” Women’s studies quarterly 40, no. 3/4 (2012): 295–300.


Fremantle, Chris. 2021. “BD Owens Reviews ‘Assuming the Ecosexual Position’ by Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle.” Ecoartscotland.net. December 27. Accessed January 5, 2022. https://ecoartscotland.net/2021/12/27/bd-owens-reviews-assuming-the-ecosexual-position/.


Gaard, Greta. “Queering Environmental Justice Through an Intersectional Lens.” American Journal of Public Health (1971), vol. 112, no. 1, 2022, pp. 57–58, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306489.

Getsy, David J. A SIGHT TO WITHHOLD. Artforum International. Vol. 56. New York: Artforum Inc, 2018.

Getsy, David. Abstract Bodies : Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.


Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, no. 1, 2015, pp. 159–65, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934.

Hessler, Stefanie, ed. Sex Ecologies. First edition. Trondheim, Norway: Kunsthall Trondheim, 2021.

Heinrich, Ari Larissa, and Jes Fan. “218An Interview with Jes Fan.” In Mapping the Posthuman, 1:218–222. 1st ed. Routledge, 2024.

“Kingston Coal Ash Disaster Still Reverberates 10 Years Later.” 2021. Southern Environmental Law Center. October 14. https://www.southernenvironment.org/news/kingston-coal-ash-disaster-still-reverberates-10-years-later/

Laibman, David. “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.” Science & Society. New York: Guilford Publications, 2006.

Mallory, Chaone. “Val Plumwood and Ecofeminist Political Solidarity: Standing with the Natural Other.” Ethics and the environment 14, no. 2 (2009): 3–21.

Manolescu, Monica. “‘Proposals for Change’: Art, Ecology and Intermediation in Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’s The Lagoon Cycle, Breathing Space for the Sava River and Endangered Meadows of Europe.” European Journal of American Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.19739.


“Microplastics in Every Human Placenta, New UNM Health Sciences Research Discovers.” 2024. Unm.edu. https://hsc.unm.edu/news/2024/02/hsc-newsroom-post-microplastics.html#:~:text=In%20a%20study%20published%20February,790%20micrograms%20per%20gram%20of.


Theunis Piersma, Jan A. van Gils. “The Flexible Phenotype: A Body-Centred Integration of Ecology, Physiology and Behaviour” https://books.google.com/books?id=kvTl_laSMIkC&lpg=PR7&ots=pUU1UoUngr&dq=bodies%20and%20ecology&lr&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=bodies%20and%20ecology&f=false