FERAL CITY
Sunday, November 2nd - Sunday, November 30thReception: Friday, November 7th, 6-9 pm
Feral City is an interactive project at Interface Gallery this November about being wild in the city. Conceived of by the art collective, Shipping+Receiving, it is a shout-out to the urban wildlife that doesn't usually make the picture books.
We're living in the age of the opportunistic mesopredator -- inventive, resourceful, abandoning traits that were once useful, but are no longer. Being wild in the city means not getting too large, not too attached to any one food source or habitat. Much like modern humans, they've learned to freelance.
People like to think they're the only scrappy, adaptable species in town, but there's a whole lot of surviving going on out there. From the charismatic megafauna (gray foxes, mountain lions) to the less charismatic (opossums, pigeons) to the mostly unnoticed (ants, salamanders) there is a whole world that has crept in around the edges of our carefully constructed urban landscape.
We have a long tradition of thinking ourselves separate from nature, especially in the city. Nature is where you might go on vacation, if you like sleeping on the ground. But the other animals (and a few plants) we polled aren't so sure about this distinction.
Shipping+Receiving will showcase this urban wildlife in a variety of ways. For the length of the show, Shipping+Receiving will use a motion-sensor infra-red camera to photograph nocturnal wildlife in the area around Interface, steadily adding images to the gallery walls. There will be interactive, public events, a nature walk, and a reading by science writer Nathanael Johnson, author of All Natural, from his new book, which is all about urban wildlife. There will also be a series of limited edition prints and 90's-style trading cards with fun facts about the heartthrobs of the East Bay urban wildlife scene.
WHAT WE DID ON SUMMER VACATION
Saturday, September 13
