Cumulative Skies, Deep Soils

Upcoming Exhibition


Cumulative Skies, Deep Soils
Erin Mallea and Jen Vaughn
March 7–April 5, 2020

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 7, 6-9pm
Gallery Hours: Sundays, 1-4pm or by appointment

Cosmic Listening Session: Saturday, March 21, afternoon (time TBA)
Schenley Park Overlook Shelter

Tune-in with the artists and Carnegie Tech Radio Club W3VC for an afternoon of looking-for and listening-in to fleeting, cosmic radio transmissions. We will track the International Space Station (ISS) and orbiting satellites to hear ISS communications and global radio calls throughout Pittsburgh's sky.

Armillaria ostoyae, commonly known as the Honey Fungus, resides in the mountains of Malheur National Forest in Eastern Oregon. It is estimated to be the largest living organism by area, covering 3.5 square miles at an estimated age of 8,650 years. After the first fall rain, Jen attempted to listen to the vibrations of these ancient rhizomatic networks. Thousands of miles away, Erin repeatedly transmitted Jen’s recorded sounds and images throughout the atmosphere via Slow Scan Television. Together, their work aims at an expanded intimacy—a move towards contact despite distance, difference, and time. Each action threads together accumulations of decay with moments of the living, the cosmic, the future.

Cumulative Skies, Deep Soils is a rhizomatic installation of sounds, crystallizing spills, meteorites and mycelium. It was created from a distance, with the goal of generating closeness against the ease of alienation and the pace of separation. 


Erin Mallea is a multidisciplinary artist motivated by an attempt to better understand the messiness of spaces she inhabits. Grounded in a generative research process, her work often focuses on the social and political dynamics embedded within relationships to land and the environment. Erin presented a proposal to the “Colonial Dames of America” advocating for the ethical memorialization and representation of a historic oak tree, recently spent a summer with biologists to learn more about land-use near her hometown in the rural Mountain West, and received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon in 2019. She is based in Pittsburgh, PA.

Jen Vaughn is an interdisciplinary artist utilizing a wide range of processes and materials to explore humanness as it is related to complex cultural constructions of self/other, nature, and gender. Negotiations, speculations, and personal interactions are enacted upon spaces and objects to manifest the complexities of human/non-human relationships. She currently lives and works in Eugene, Oregon where she is a member of Ditch Projects and an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at Western Oregon University.


Special thanks to Jeremy Klotz, the Carnegie Tech Radio Club W3VC, and Tyler Blensdorf for their generosity, support, and assistance with SSTV transmission and audio engineering.

This project is supported by funds from the Oregon Arts Commission.


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