Multispecies Salon II November 10, 2008

(San Francisco, California, October 2nd, 2008) Today co-curators
Marnia Johnston and Dr. Eben Kirksey announced an art exhibition that will explore the worlds of microbes, animals, and plants. Works by artists, scientists, and schoolchildren will be on display from
November 10 through December 6 in the PLAySPACE Gallery of the
California College of Arts. The event is free and the gallery will be
open to the public. Gallery hours are Tuesday 3-7pm, Thursday 3-7pm, and Saturday 12-2pm.

Living organisms will be brought from the intimate spaces of homes and scientific laboratories to the Multispecies Salon II. "We will display
creatures that are flourishing in unexpected places alongside
representations of species in danger of extinction," said Kirksey.
"Working with fragile organisms in a foreign space, we will engage
with issues relating to care, contact, and contagion," he said. The
event builds on conversations that took place during the first
Multispecies Salon at UC Santa Cruz in 2006.

According to Kirksey, encounters between natural and cultural worlds
are transforming our ideas about what it means to be human. "Many of the works selected deal with ideas surrounding human contamination; physical and genetic," added Johnston. "We do not have the discrete bodies we think we have. For example, there are ten times more bacterial cells living in or on the human body than human cells," she said.

"Our bodies are shared, rented, and occupied. To realize that we go
beyond the porous boundary of our skin, to acknowledge non-humans as an integral part of human bodies, is to be more than human, perhaps to be post- or trans-human," Johnston continued.

The art exhibit involves serious play, curiosity, and risk-taking. "We
are using the gallery space to open up opportunities for collaboration
across disciplinary divides and social boundaries that rarely get
crossed," said Kirksey.

The exhibit is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the
Center for Science and Technology Studies of Santa Clara University,
and the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz. The
Multispecies Salon II will take place alongside a series of events at
the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association at the San Francisco Hilton and Towers, November 19-24.

The California College of Arts is located at 1111 Carolina Street in
the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. For directions to the
event, call 800-447-1278.

For more information about the event, visit
http://www.skyhighway.com/~multispecies_salon/ .

Interested parties can contact S. Eben Kirksey, Ph.D., Santa Clara
University, [email protected], 831-600-5937, or Marnia Johnston, [email protected], 650-520-1878.