left: Detail of guano deposit and settlement, Chincha Islands, Peru, 1862. Courtesy of New Bedford Whaling Museum.
right: Detail, Sheep Meadow looking southwest, Central Park, circa 1905. Photograph by William Hale Kirk. © William Hale Kirk / Museum of the City of New York.

We are pleased to bring landscape architect and critic Jane Mah Hutton for an in-gallery talk on her recent research. Drawing from the book project, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, this in-person talk explores how the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from are related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed. Following the movement of common construction materials in their many contexts and forms offers a chance to see them as more than fixed commodities and rather as continuous with other landscapes, people, and species elsewhere.

Mah Hutton’s lecture is part of a parallel program related to our current solo exhibition Rights of Passage by Lou Sheppard. Echoing the critique of extractivism embedded in western relationships to the landscape in Sheppard’s work, we have invited Mah Hutton to speak on her research to build a critical frame around Sheppard’s work.

Join us as we, together with Mah Hutton, follow the path of various materials from source to destination, and how this movement can be related to the riparian context.

Jane Mah Hutton teaches landscape architecture at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. Her research focuses on the expanded relationships of the act of building – examining the movement of materials as they pass from production landscapes (plantations, quarries) through designed constructions (buildings, landscapes), to care and maintenance through demolition and disposal or re-use. Recent books include Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, Landscript 5: Material Culture-Assembling and Disassembling Landscapes, and Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial, co-edited with Daniel Ibanez and Kiel Moe.

To register: https://agyu.as.me/