Join us for the opening of Into the ground by Joe Riley and Audrey Snyder, and stay for Reading by Moonrise with Jess Arndt and Myriam Gurba.

Into the ground is a collaborative sculpture by Audrey Snyder and Joe Riley, originally commissioned for The Socrates Annual at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. The project reflects on how urban ecologies uptake and transform contaminants, and how collective bodies realize agency through ground-up organizing. At Socrates, this sculpture engaged with the park’s history of transformation from landfill to public park, and at the Bowtie, it will draw similar parallels to the site’s iterative transformation in progress.

The evening will begin with a walk to Into the ground, featuring a brief conversation with the artists. We will then meet around the campfire for readings and s’mores with Jess Arndt and Myriam Gurba.

Joe Riley & Audrey Snyder are collaborators with one another and the artist collective Futurefarmers. Their art combines the poetic, political, and practical as a point of entry to explore dense interactions of urban and rural concourses, human and nonhuman forms. The work is context-specific and collaborative in (and with) nature. Their material-based practice attends to the connectivity of ecology and infrastructures: finding expression as sculpture, installation, and public engagements. Tangled in the knotty togetherness of geological time and political urgencies, this work proceeds with the hope of grasping the past in order to excite the present and future.

Myriam Gurba is a high school teacher, writer, podcaster and artist who lives in Long Beach, California. Her most recent book, the true crime memoir Mean, was a New York Times editors’ choice. Publishers Weekly describes her as a “literary voice like none other.” Gurba co-hosts the AskBiGrlz advice podcast with cartoonist, and fellow biracialist, MariNaomi. Her collage and digital artwork has been shown in museums, galleries, and community centers.

This project’s installation in Los Angeles is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.