Linda Cunningham and Nicky Enright Curated by Manon Slome

The exhibition, What on Earth have you done? is in title, content and form a reflection and a challenge about our joint complicity in environmental degradation.

As reflected in Nicky Enright’s rendering of the text (below), echoed again in the windows of the gallery space, not one fragment of the sentence, as it repeats with different emphasis, allows for any evasion from this complicity.  

This is a two-person exhibition with Linda Cunningham and Nicky Enright, both long term Bronx residents, who respond with powerful works that foster an imaginative interaction with this environmental crisis and the complex feelings engendered by the fraught relationship between humans and other living species on the planet, and between humans and our rapidly-changing environment.   

As Nicky Enright comments: The juxtapositions in my work reflect the anger, hope, disbelief, and grief about the destruction of our natural habitat due to irresponsible, short-sighted human behavior. 

Linda Cunningham, in her monumental mixed-media installation South Bronx Waterfront Sagas, 2016-22, evokes the deterioration of the banks of the East River in the South Bronx.  Residents have long been barred from enjoying this local resource by a pattern of local government neglect, dumping and vandalism.  The detritus figured in the work, which escapes the boundaries of the canvas to flow into an installation on the gallery floor, evokes a sadness for a natural beauty and a community resource that has been lost or could be imagined if there was civic will and funding to turn the river banks into places of restful leisure or recreation. But as new developments and high rises start to occupy these neighboring sections of the Bronx, there are signs of cleanup of the water’s edge that will profit these new buildings, while leaving the remaining waterfront unchanged, filled with rusting machinery, power stations or waterfront transfer sites.  Shown alongside the work is a 2016 film by French filmmaker Judith Du Pasquier documenting Cunningham’s process in creating the mixed- media wall canvas, which was originally made for the lobby of the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

The ominous sound of relentless development is captured in Nicky Enright’s video installation Between a Rock, (2007 & 2022) where the sound of hammers breaking rock dominates a landscape of broken shards. His monumental drawing, FRACKments 01, 2023, created specifically for this exhibition, combines in its title the concepts of Fracking and Fragments to construct a new layer of meaning.  A drawn collage of images, based mostly on his own photographs, and made using basic drawing materials on multiple sheets of paper, the work explores the fragile ecosystem that is Nature and creates a dreamlike meditation on climate change.

Completing this multi-sensory evocation of environmental collapse is Enright’s Eco-Urgency Mixtape (2023) by aka DJ Lightbolt. The mixtape is a 45-minute DJ mix created for this exhibition, to help process the climate crisis through music.

Exhibition Date: January 10, 2023 - February 25, 2023

Location: Bronx Art Space

700 Manida Street, Ground Floor Entrance on Spofford Ave

Bronx, NY 10474

Gallery hours: Thursday + Friday 2-6pm, Saturday 12-5pm

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