Earthly Delights: Erika Osborne and Tracy Stuckey

About this event

Recently, Erika Osborne and Tracy Stuckey have found themselves returning to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, a painting that seems to unravel the very fantasy of paradise it depicts. For them, it has become an increasingly poignant metaphor for the American West: a landscape of human decadence and sensuality, haunted by morbid histories and the foreboding of death. The perversity of the garden myth has given rise to a reality in which our Western forests and waters are depleted, our arid lands overrun by extraction and technology, and our flora and fauna pushed toward extinction.

In this exhibition, Erika explores these themes through the lens of the nonhuman—or, more precisely, the often-overlooked, more-than-human pollinators essential to bringing life back to forests devastated by wildfire. Tracy, in turn, approaches these same themes through the distinctly human lenses of fashion, art, and culture. Between the human and more-than-human, the sublime and the mundane, we seek new ways of imagining our place within the complicated, fragile, and ever-changing landscapes of the American West.