Join the Institute for Art and Olfaction for a conversation with artist Carrie Paterson and Christopher Michno (Assistant Director of Pitzer College Art Galleries) as they discuss Paterson's solo exhibition: Beneath the Earth, the Sky, and her creative practice. Carrie Paterson’s art-technology practice uses research and haptic experience to explore memory, renewal, and sensory experience. She enjoys a good critique of phenomenology as it reveals itself in nationalism, cultures of extraction and accumulation, scarcity capitalism, extortion, violent ideologies, and blood-and-soil Heideggerianism. Using displacement, temporality, and nomadicity as counter valences to phenomenological readings, she traverses meanings of place and territory with a spatial philosophy that redirects the outward journey to the internal, grounds the metaphysical in the secular, and pays close attention to the human-earth/nature “metabolic rift” (Kohei Saito) while investing in cultures of care. Via periodic orientation in language and mapping, Paterson recalls familiar natural forms and building materials, combining them with speculative devices humans use to deepen and expand perception of the world. Her collaborative partners are plants and trees — those architects of our pasts and our futures — as well as stones and the wisdom of the inner body, which are on a temporal continuum with the energy of the cosmos. The other important subject in her work over the past 25 years is gravity – its latent effects, our attempts to escape it, and the temporary freedom of weightless experience. Implicit in the inability to completely excise gravity from her sculptural vocabulary is failure, wherein surrender and dissolution eclipse production.