Despite a culturally entrenched conviction that ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ are opposites, ecologically they do not constitute a dichotomy. These states of being are equally engaged in, and essential to, the dynamic energy interchanges among air, water, sunshine, rocks, and soil that enable life on Earth. This ecological fact is absent from customary funeral rites and mortuary laws that tend to treat death as the termination of a biography, and an occasion for sorrow, grief, and mourning.

The proposed exhibition assembles artists who present death as a complement to life, and decomposition as a corollary to growth. These artists focus on the physical remains of the deceased animal, plant, microbe, or human because it is within the material realm that the revitalizing functions of death transpire. That is how the organism transitions from a consumer of resources to a donor of the elements required for use by new forms of life. Decomposition is the process by which this efficient recycling of biological material occurs. This process is conducted by populations of protozoa, bacteria, fungi, earthworms, termites, millipedes, and so forth. This vast and diverse sanitation crew dismantles corpses by loosening the energy bonds between the molecules that once maintained the organisms. Once liberated, these molecules can be returned to the storehouse of material elements and available for organizing into new forms of life.

The exhibited works of art demonstrate that it is an affront to Earth’s sublime and intricate balance that we deride one half of the equation that perpetuates life. The shift in attitude is conveyed by purging the cultural prejudices against decay that is evident in wood preservatives, food stabilizers, rust retardants, Botox injections, cryogenics, and fluoride treatments. By focusing on its life-enhancing functions, they transform attitudes about putrefaction from the ‘abject’ into the ‘exalted ‘. This mission also vitalizesthe practice of contemporary art. Replacing repugnance of the post-death scenarios with appreciation introduces more than a new art theme. The eco artists assembled for the proposed on-line exhibition also reconfigure art’s material components by presenting decay as a reassuring sign of health, resilience, and vitality. Through their work death earns the respectful salutation typically accorded to life,

presenting both on the matrix upon which Earth’s vitalizing energies transpire.

Post script – This exhibition focuses on the death of individual organisms, not the death of populations and species. Deaths associated with extinction are not cyclic. Deaths due to extinction are commonly associated with ecological crisis, not wholesome renewal.