***To receive a copy of this limited edition, 24-page print exhibition in your mailbox, email hello@space538.org. Each copy is $30 with 100% of proceeds going to Presente Maine.***

A NOTE ON FRUIT

Ripe. Tender. Succulent. Firm, giving to the touch. It is said forbidden fruit brought us down to Earth, to live as we do now. So what is fruit, if not our humanity?

My grandfather would arrive home to Hong Kong from long trips abroad with cases upon cases of fresh fruit for his seven children. My father was known to hack a watermelon in half with a Chinese cleaver and take to it with a spoon in one sitting. When he married my mother, he was shocked the day he watched her with her paring knife peel and slice an apple for the family to share. How stingy, he always roars as he tells this story. Throwing his head back and laughing at the thought of it. He’s the one who taught me how to eat bags of dried, salted plums outside so we could spit the pits out of our mouths, kicking them into the air. Fruit in large, ample supply is a form of generosity and care. To feed and nourish, hydrate and fulfill. Peel back tender skin and find our flesh; fruit is lineage.

And so, we arrive at the word fruition – to bear fruit, to fully realize. How do we fully realize ourselves, where we come from, and where we are now? FRUITION asks what fruit means to us, how our roots, our bodies – the fruit of many labors – move in this world around us. FRUITION examines fruit and its place in the human and natural world.

Six artists, women from all over this continent, took action to ruminate upon any and all of the following: seed to sprout, tenderness, labor, land, movement, fruit as culture, fruit as slang, fruit as an offering to the spirits. Can fruit provide insight to our past while being a means to a more tender future? Let a study on fruit lead us there!

Blessings on our fruit and on each other,

Alana Dao