Alter Eco
Sarita Doe
1 March 2025 — 26 April 2025
Exhibit Opening: March 1, 2025, 1 - 5 PM
Climate Control
2831 Mission St.
San Francisco, CA
Open Fridays and Saturdays 12 - 5:30 PM and by appointment.
Climate Control announces the exhibition alter eco, a solo presentation of recent natural pigment paintings and native flora installation by artist Sarita Doe. This is Sarita’s first solo exhibition in the Bay Area. A series of public programs will accompany the exhibition throughout its run, supporting local arts and land stewardship as well as partnering with the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. An opening reception will be held at the gallery Saturday, March 1st, 1-5pm.
The setting for Sarita Doe’s paintings is an expanse of time, only partially visible through their tightly patterned and deeply pigmented compositions on display in alter eco. Through close observations of specific sites of land, prayer and offerings towards soil regeneration, and a witnessing of the collaboration and co-conspirator-ship of the flora and fauna around her, Doe seeks a suspension of the self’s temporal experience as a singularity, felt in isolation, in the anthropomorphic realm, to calibrate to the rhythms and movements of habitats within the natural world. She does so as a way to better understand grief, change, knowledge, her own child – to make sense of other’s lived experiences, to sense how they might make sense of her, and of us, in turn. The paintings are the results of this process, a document of sorts in noticing the space we share with so much life around us. She is a student. She is a teacher.
Through the space between her act of painting and the work itself is an experiment and interrogation with how this present chapter in the Modern world has defined “human.” Although the Anthropocene was not introduced into popular consciousness to describe the current geological age until 2000, many scholars within geography, anthropology, and the humanities have tapped the year 1492 as a symbolic beginning to what we now know to be our own current crisis of man-made environmental change. With the rapid land-grab of the mid-millennia by Western nations, came a new suite of rights taken as self-evident to the consciousness of domineering societies. These rights include the right to destroy worlds and manufacture them as new, as well as the right to declare what is new and subsequently othered, backwards, tired, and obsolete. (1) Historian T.J. Demos points out in his Against the Anthropocene that this time also inaugurated the joining of the two hemispheres under a kind of global capitalism, one that still writes the definition of progress today. Under this rule, Anthropocentric thinking has occluded the varied historic human (Indigenous) understandings of nature as well as blanketed the burden of climate crisis as a universal event, despite its very obvious disproportionate effects that communities experience all over the globe due to a matrix of inequalities from economic resources, habitable infrastructure, and social alienation.
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