Though shown individually in three adjoining galleries, each artist’s work engages with what it feels like to be a human animal in a lifeworld that struggles to support our collective and systemic behaviors while also desperately wanting to change. These works ask, what is nature if we are also nature? Can we tear up our cultural predecessors while still loving them? How should we handle our complicated relationships with our Mother (Earth)?

The most elemental mode of human travel is on foot, walking. (The bipedal mode of transportation is considered a hallmark of Homo sapiens).

Curated by Alexandra Fanning, the show includes two video works by Thai-Australian artist Kawita Vatanajyankur and an ongoing sculpture-performance by the Brooklyn-based Russian-American Liza Buzytsky.

Harding’s work is about the spirit of things, and the ways that things and beings communicate amongst each other in the spaces between and beyond language. For her, landscapes, animals, and even light are full of information that is available to us if we listen and look. Harding’s current installation asks occupants of the space to sit down and take part in this expanded conversation.

Described as “an Eden in the city,” the exhibition has little time for the shame of a disobedient Eve—nor the perpetuation of the Cartesian split between mind and body used by Western thought to subjugate women, colonized peoples, and nature.

Recent neurophysiological research suggests that comprehension of metaphors is grounded in sensory perception. Robin Winters’ Free Standing Sentence, now on view at Present Company in Bushwick, supports this idea.

Five stories with SWOON was a presentation of a multi-platform project by Caledonia Curry (the artist and activist also known as Swoon) at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.