Media Gallery Section A, CICA Museum,
June 18 – 22, 2025
2025.6.18 – 22
Verdant Echoes: The Martian Gardener Project
Long after contact with Mars was lost, later missions uncovered faint traces of cultivation amid the red dust—fragments of a botanical legacy that had lingered unseen. Verdant Echoes gathers these vestiges of quiet defiance and devotion to nurturing life in a hostile world. Recovered from inner sanctums and abandoned greenhouses, the artifacts reveal delicate biomes sustained against a barren landscape—not merely for survival, but as rituals of emotional and spiritual connection, reaching back to Earth’s life forms across profound isolation. Threaded through these works are echoes of restless inquiry and invention: plant-inspired mechanisms designed to scatter sensors across the Martian surface; blueprints and drawings envisioning bioengineered species, hydroponic structures, and emergent forms of resilience. Records of plant trials mingle with glimpses of unanticipated life, while plant elegies offer meditations on loss, memory, and transformation. Each piece bears witness to the intricate dance of experimentation and adaptation—a testament to how life’s possibilities are continually reshaped, with wonder and surprise. The Martian Gardener Project invites reflection on creative persistence as an act of resistance and hope, shaping new expressions of life, beauty, and meaning on Martian soil.
In the Martian Gardener Project, Sung-A Jang and Dan Mikesell use Mars as a lens to explore how techno-organic forms might arise in unfamiliar worlds. Their collaborative artifacts—tools, prototypes, and studies—act as thought experiments, tracing the outlines of ecologies and rituals for futures not yet realized. Bridging science, history, and speculative design, their work prompts us to contemplate how ingenuity, technology, and living systems might co-evolve. At its core, the project considers how the practice of cultivation—especially in isolation or exile—becomes an act of quiet faith. In these distant habitats, gardening is more than survival: it is a daily ritual that roots memory, longing, and renewal, creating space for spirit and meaning to persist even on barren ground. Fragments and relics invite reflection on how tending to life in unlikely places can sustain us—offering a sanctuary where imagination and resilience take root. Working across physical and digital media, Sung-A Jang’s practice weaves together artistic, technical, and scientific exploration, creating experiences that spark playful curiosity and invite new ways of seeing and engaging. Dan Mikesell is an artist, engineer, and educator whose current work explores the dynamic relationship between technology and ecology through art. Their combined backgrounds bring technical rigor and creative openness to their collaborations, grounding speculative investigations in material experimentation and cross-disciplinary inquiry.
