Opening Lecture: Thursday March 19 at Light Hall Theater, 6PM

• Opening Reception: McCray Gallery, 7PM
  
• Exhibition runs through April 9, 2026

Both lecture and reception are free admission.

Claire Fall Blanchette is an artist working across multiple disciplines including sculpture, printmaking, and drawing. Using organic and unconventional materials, Claire investigates the boundaries that humans have established between the built world and the environment. Her work questions how human and non-human partnerships may offer alternative strategies of survival for more symbiotic future.

Ground Truthing brings together fragmented rock, microbial films, and fungal networks to reframe human relationships to the natural world. In science, ground truthing refers to validating remote sensing data through direct observation in the field. In the gallery, the ground truth is formed from site-specific investigations in the Silver City region that examine tensions between anthropogenic legacies and non-human agency.

Drawing on the ideas of geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, Ground Truthing explores how we assign and derive meaning from the world’s geography, organizing the world around ourselves. Throughout the exhibition, organic materials intertwine with remnants of human impact, tracing intersections of deep time, industrial extraction, and biological repair. Dried kombucha SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast), grown with water from the Gila River, is illuminated to reveal abstracted imagery of vulnerable riparian sites. Mycelial networks, the root system of a fungus, consume printed images of anthropogenic interventions in the land. Rocks collected from Boston Hill mining sites are combined with sculpted mycelium, presenting the fungus as an agent of care, capable of eroding rock and remediating soils.

The inherent processes of bacterial and fungal networks unveil alternative ways of existence that move away from the anthropocentric perspective. In contrast to humans, mycelium and kombucha SCOBY participate in reciprocal relationships with other organisms. Intertwined, they form a life raft that increases their collective chance of survival. As materials and active collaborators, these organisms invite us to envision futures rooted in symbiotic partnership.

Collapsing the distance between the microscopic and the topographical, Ground Truthing encourages viewers to slow down and notice eons of geological activity recorded in a single rock and the intricate networks thriving underground. By engaging with specific sites and materials, this exhibition asks how we can cultivate care for vulnerable ecologies by examining organic processes as models for fostering a mutually beneficial world.