Rachel Sussman, The Oldest Living Things in the World

For the past decade, Brooklyn-based artist Rachel Sussman has been researching, working with scientists, and traveling all over the world to photograph continuously living organisms 2,000 years old and older. Her work spans disciplines, continents, and millennia: it’s part art and part science, has an innate environmentalism, and is underscored by an existential incursion into Deep Time. She’s captured everything from multi-millennial trees to 5,500-year-old moss to half-million-year-old bacteria, traveling from Antarctica to Greenland to the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback. Her New York Times best selling book of 2014 features forewords by Hans Ulrich Obrist and scientist Carl Zimmer. Sussman is a TED speaker, a Guggenheim, NYFA and MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a member of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Corps. She was awarded the LACMA Lab Art + Tech grant to produce new work exploring Deep Time and deep space with SpaceX and NASA JPL. Her work can be found in university, museum, corporate, and private collections.

The exhibition of Sussman's works at Pioneer Works was curated by Christina Costello and ran September 13 – November 2, 2014.

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