Casey Kaplan
Flesh of the Forest
August 28 – December 13, 2025
OxyArts, Los Angeles, CA
Flesh of the Forest brings together nine contemporary artists from the African diaspora whose work engages with the forest as a rich, multilayered site of history, memory, sensation, and feeling. Through sculpture, painting, film, and installation, the forest emerges as both a surreal landscape and a reservoir of ancestral knowledge where the visible and invisible coexist. In this exhibition, danger, whimsy, enchantment, vulnerability, abundance, and darkness precipitate alternate ways of seeing, hearing, being, and knowing that are at once historical, speculative, and ecological. The works on view also imagine new forms of human and nonhuman interaction that dispense with exploitative entanglements between empire and land.
Sydney Cain explores the relationship between Blackness and liminality, being and non-being. In the works on view here, part of their continuing project The Forest is the Water, Cain mobilizes darkness as both subject and palette. This exhibition is curated by visiting curator Tiffany E. Barber, Assistant Professor of African American Art in the Department of Art History at UCLA.
For more information, please visit the OxyArts website here.