Seasons of Kinship: Cyrah Dardas & Mother Cyborg

Opening Friday January 17, 4-7pm

Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 12-6pm

Join the artists for an intimate Woodward Lecture gallery tour of their new exhibition on February 25, 2025

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Seasons of Kinship, a dual show by Cyrah Dardas and Mother Cyborg, explores the power, temporality, and ebon flow of relations within our ecosystem. Using natural materials grown by each artist, this exhibition is a testament to the intertwining and understanding between humans, land, and the ecosystem. A dinner table, a symbol of reverence, honors the lost knowledge and hidden stories in plant life. The use of natural dyes and paints in the tapestries and paintings reflects the reciprocity and symbiotic practices our human and non-human kin can create in relation. The artists’ work is a radical yet inspiring way of imagining a generative and knowledge-sharing way of being in a relationship with each other and the environment.

For Dardas, the prevalent systems and practices, such as capitalism and cis-hetero patriarchy, are extractive and essentially built upon practices that do not uphold life; they ensure death. The opposite of these are models we see in “nature,” such as the three sisters or the relationship between trees and mushrooms in which each plant strengthens itself by strengthening each other. They affirm and usher in life with every action through their form and function.  For Mother Cyborg, it is about the hidden stories and knowledge within the land that have accumulated over time and how we unlock those stories through various relationships with each other and ourselves within our environments.

Together, they want us to pay attention to the systems and relationships we are surrounded by, honor them, and tap into them for knowledge rather than extraction for human gain. The artists believe in the transformative power of our human and nonhuman relationships as teachers, caretakers, and ancestors. By embracing these roles, we can deny reinforcing the toxic systems that frequently present themselves to us through capitalism. This show honors the power of the symbiotic nature of relating that unlocks love and kinship, opening new ways of knowing and relating to the world around us.