Krautsourcing | S.E. Nash

“Krautsourcing” by S.E. Nash is a socially engaged exhibition that continues the artist’s investigation into the collective and creative inventions of people and microbes. In his ongoing work with fermentation, Nash creates homages to fermented foods. The ferments are displayed in concert with sculptures, bubbling, changing color and revealing perceptual changes over time. The work raises ontological questions, exploring the gaps between living and nonliving, active and static, art and non-art.

For “Krautsourcing,” Nash presents a series of sculptural and wall-based works that draw on the territories of the kitchen and the science lab as extensions of the studio and sites of knowledge production. “Krautsourcing” generates a space for working with microbes and for thinking through connections between the artist’s transgender experience, family history, fermentation practice and symbiotic existence. In this layered space, all organisms and atoms produce knowledge and subvert subject positions by engaging in a perpetual exchange.

In advance of the opening of “Krautsourcing,” Nash invited people to participate by making their own sauerkraut, culminating in a performance of mixing and sharing the combined fermented vegetable krauts for the opening of the show. As we view the resulting collective kraut now on display, Nash asks us to consider our bodily entanglements, particularly with the bacteria that engendered life nearly four billion years ago.