ARTISTS
Ecotechnics
IRVINE, Calif. (September 17, 2026) - The Beall Center for Art + Technology at the University of California, Irvine, is pleased to announce the opening of Ecotechnics, curated by Zachary Korol Gold. The exhibition opens on Saturday, October 10, 2026, from 2 to 5 p.m., and will run through Saturday, February 6, 2027.
Ecotechnics gathers contemporary artists who treat ecology not as a given but as a process of imaging. The works here take divergent paths among the technologies, histories and fictions by which environments and organisms are known. In turning the technical images and devices that monitor or measure environments back on themselves, they picture how contemporary society produces an ecological view. The exhibition asks how we, through technology and as technical beings, sense and represent the living world.
The works move between images, bodies, memories and fictions. The hand-rendered wing of a mantis becomes the stage for the play of abstract painting, while a painting vibrates between micro and macro scales. A microscope reveals the image world of kombucha, and the bacteria-yeast colony becomes the screen for its own projected image. Orchid flowers too small to see with the naked eye tangle with microplastic threads.
If these play with making the unseen visible, others address bodies as environments, in which the mechanism of response occurs prior to conscious recognition. A synthetic aroma piques the nose while rejuvenating skin, and ultrasonic speakers reverberate the bodies of museum visitors. Poison ivy, sprouting in the UC Irvine greenhouse, receives psychoanalytic treatment.
Others construct environments as spaces of memory and fiction. In a post-apocalyptic opera, a communard falls in love with an Al secret agent sent to steal energy-generating bacteria. A video traces flowers growing around a home in Altadena, now lost to the fires. A room constructs a seed vault, its architecture bridging survivalist subcultures with nationalist apocalyptic fantasies. Soil, preserved beneath the pavement encasing the Los Angeles River, once again sprouts.
The ambiguous situation in the gallery operates within and beyond sense and recognition. Some elements grow, others degrade, some hang silently, while still others click and loop. The works make the dissolution of nature and technology promised by ecology a problem in form. Taking up technical images and environmental fabulation, they find artifice in nature, nature in artifice. Here, "environment" does not denote a space for activity, but an active, technical process.
The opening reception will take place on Saturday, October 10, from 2 to 5 p.m. The Beall Center offers free admission and is open to the public during the academic year from Tuesday-Saturday, noon-6 p.m.
Ecotechnics is supported by The Beall Family Foundation and the Claire Trevor School of the Arts.
Recommended for you
IRVINE, Calif. (September 17, 2026) - The Beall Center for Art + Technology at the University of California, Irvine, is pleased to announce the opening of Ecotechnics, curated by Zachary Korol Gold. The exhibition opens on Saturday, October 10, 2026, from 2 to 5 p.m., and will run through Saturday, February 6, 2027.
Ecotechnics gathers contemporary artists who treat ecology not as a given but as a process of imaging. The works here take divergent paths among the technologies, histories and fictions by which environments and organisms are known. In turning the technical images and devices that monitor or measure environments back on themselves, they picture how contemporary society produces an ecological view. The exhibition asks how we, through technology and as technical beings, sense and represent the living world.
The works move between images, bodies, memories and fictions. The hand-rendered wing of a mantis becomes the stage for the play of abstract painting, while a painting vibrates between micro and macro scales. A microscope reveals the image world of kombucha, and the bacteria-yeast colony becomes the screen for its own projected image. Orchid flowers too small to see with the naked eye tangle with microplastic threads.
If these play with making the unseen visible, others address bodies as environments, in which the mechanism of response occurs prior to conscious recognition. A synthetic aroma piques the nose while rejuvenating skin, and ultrasonic speakers reverberate the bodies of museum visitors. Poison ivy, sprouting in the UC Irvine greenhouse, receives psychoanalytic treatment.
Others construct environments as spaces of memory and fiction. In a post-apocalyptic opera, a communard falls in love with an Al secret agent sent to steal energy-generating bacteria. A video traces flowers growing around a home in Altadena, now lost to the fires. A room constructs a seed vault, its architecture bridging survivalist subcultures with nationalist apocalyptic fantasies. Soil, preserved beneath the pavement encasing the Los Angeles River, once again sprouts.
The ambiguous situation in the gallery operates within and beyond sense and recognition. Some elements grow, others degrade, some hang silently, while still others click and loop. The works make the dissolution of nature and technology promised by ecology a problem in form. Taking up technical images and environmental fabulation, they find artifice in nature, nature in artifice. Here, "environment" does not denote a space for activity, but an active, technical process.
The opening reception will take place on Saturday, October 10, from 2 to 5 p.m. The Beall Center offers free admission and is open to the public during the academic year from Tuesday-Saturday, noon-6 p.m.
Ecotechnics is supported by The Beall Family Foundation and the Claire Trevor School of the Arts.
Contact details
What's on nearby
