The Skirt 

Ezra Jude: Black Mayonnaise and Bio-Mutants 

January 9 - March 14th 2021

Opening hours: January 9, 1-7pm

Situated within the Skirt, OyG’s dedicated space for site-specific installations, Black Mayonnaise and Bio-Mutants is a reliquary for toxic waste and chemical mutagens. Just across the street from the gallery, the Gowanus Canal is a symphonic stink of innumerable putrefactions. An EPA Superfund site, the canal has been designated a dangerously polluted hazard of national priority. Government proposals to decontaminate the poisonous waters are expensive and brusque: remove the toxic sediment, bury it in a landfill, and repave the canal bed with fresh concrete. The cleanup plans will rollout this year (2021), dredging the two miles of septic debris – a deadly concoction of coal tar, lead paint, mercury, and raw sewage.  

Ezra Jude responds to environmental catastrophes such as this via a perverse and eco-feminist lens, reassessing both the anthropocentric responsibility and the human-centric solutions. Indeed, the canal has already devised its own methods of remediation. Entirely new life forms have evolved and adapted to these waters, consuming our excrement and refuse and slowly creating for themselves a healthy and habitable environment. Black Mayonnaise and Bio-Mutants is an aesthetic shrine to the tenacity of microorganisms, to their accountability and stewardship. It is likewise a visual and aural timeline of the historical events that brought the canal to its toxic present. 

Artist Bio
Ezra Jude (they/he) devises ecological interventions and speculative futures. Dystopian and pseudo-scientific, these installations engage with queer identity and the Anthropocene as a means to reimagine the self-imposed binary between human culture and the environment. While seeking resolutions to the imminent problems of climate change and trans/non-binary oppression, each project is approached with a sense of rewilding, re-queering, and reassessing humankind’s relationship to this planet and its manifold organisms. Based between London and NYC, Ezra is a Marshall Scholar and received an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Their sculptures and performances have been exhibited at RIXC Center for New Media Culture (Latvia), the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and Arebyte Gallery (London). Ezra Jude is the art/performance pseudonym of Antonio Campelli.