Connie Zheng, Terrine
opening reception July 9, 2022 1–4pm
on view July 9–August 6, 2022
open most Saturdays 10–2 or by appointment

Connie is a storyteller. She plants seeds; ideas and images that make the mundane and familiar feel strange and dislocating. Maps of places you thought you knew; dream and myth layered over familiar topography.

As we traded emails back-and-forth, Connie described the nascent project that would become Terrine as a mindmap for a graphic novel project about "the banalities and exigencies of late-stage capitalism amidst a zombie apocalypse." Presented as an arrangement of painted imagery on glass window panes, with hand-painted wall text and images, Terrine offers a glimpse of a world reimagined: struck by a mundane apocalypse, a populous shrugs off the horror confronting them at every turn because they still need to pay rent. Through storytelling Connie confronts climate degradation and capitalist exploitation, while placing audiences in the position of those who keep going, planting seeds—wherever they can—for the future.

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Shambling Toward Oblivion

"If you want to learn to live in the anthropocene, we must first learn how to die."
—Roy Scranton, quoted in Connie Zheng's A certain kind of fluorescence, 2018

By Daniel J Glendening


Connie is a storyteller. She plants seeds; ideas and images that make the mundane and familiar feel strange and dislocating. Maps of places you thought you knew; dream and myth layered over familiar topography.

A seed, too, is a story. It contains within it multitudes of possibility: an infinite array of beginnings, middles, and ends.

In the fall, walking along a trail, I picked up a hard round California Buckeye seed: a bit larger than a golf ball, roan in hue, shiny. Heavy. I picked up another, this one with the beginning of a root probing out from the smooth surface. A short, white finger, seeking. I pocketed these, and picked up a third, smaller. Holding it, there, in the trees, what was it? Was it a different thing in my hand, or in my pocket, than it was on the ground? Was it inert? Dormant? Was it potential, or was it already happening? Had its story begun? Or ended?

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In Connie's short film, The Lonely Age, 2019, a group of young people, clad in long-sleeves, N95s, and safety goggles, sifts through sand with found tools. Voiceovers describe mysterious seeds that may be supernatural, or extraterrestrial; seeds with healing powers; seeds that may be sentient, or the product of some biological experiment. A landscape torched by flame rolls past, accompanied by the sound of clunking windshield wipers. In glimpses, a strange entity—humanoid and shrouded in a large mane of fiber and cord, its flesh rippling with color and light—moves through shrubbery and grasslands. This narrative continues in Seedtime, 2020: mask-clad people greet the sea amid ruins; they sleep and play in some forgotten architecture, recounting memories and dreams. There is a sense that something terrible has happened in the world Connie conjures, but that within that terror is also hope. The characters believe that something great will come: from the seeds, from themselves, or each other.

While Connie's prior work, such as Notes on fluorescence, 2018, directly addresses global climate degradation and US-driven capitalist-imperialist exploitation as direct causes and beneficiaries, in The Lonely Age those critiques form the context of a narrative. What we see and experience, in The Lonely Age and Seedtime, are the stories of those who are caught in the wake of disaster, forced to live through it and find ways to continue in its aftermath. This is a mundane apocalypse—a disaster that unfolds at a pace that allows time to accept, if not adapt to, the trauma. Released prior to COVID-19-related shelter-in-place orders in the US, one could think of these films as prescient, but in truth we had, even then, been living through a slowly unfolding disaster for years, if not decades.

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Rooted in Haitian culture and religious practices, the zombie has long been co-opted by Western narrative industries. With roots in anti-Blackness, racism, and Christian nationalism, those narratives have evolved over time to utilize the zombie as a malleable tool of social critique. In "Voodoo: Search for the Spirit," Laënnec Hurbon describes the zombie of voodoo as a person "already 'dead' and buried...reawakened to a semiconscious life to serve as a slave on a plantation...some people have declared themselves zombies, and others, it is said, may be found in the streets." The zombie is aware of its surroundings, actions, and circumstances, but is unable to react; they perform only under the direction of another. To proclaim oneself a zombie is to recognize oneself as subjugated and dehumanized by an exploitative social-political-economic system that seeks only to extract, to use, and cast aside.

Connie described Terrine as a mindmap for a graphic novel project about "the banalities and exigencies of late-stage capitalism amidst a zombie apocalypse." In other words, a look at a world in which disaster has struck and has entwined itself into every aspect of social, economic, and creative endeavor, but in which life, simply, goes on. A mundane apocalypse, in which a populous shrugs off the horror confronting them at every turn because they still need to pay rent. If this sounds familiar, well, that's because it is: this is the world we live in.

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Time moves slowly, until it doesn't. A paper cited by the United Nations' 2022 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, "Pandemics, Climate Extremes, Tipping Points and the Global Catastrophic Risk: How these Impact Global Targets" by Thomas Cernev, finds that "it is evident that in the absence of ambitious policy and near global adoption and successful implementation, the world continually tends towards the global collapse scenario."

The Lonely Age includes footage shot in the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire, which swept through the California town of Paradise and burned 153,336 acres, resulting in $16.65 billion in damages. This is just one incident among many pointing to widespread climate instability and infrastructural collapse: wildfire, flooding, blizzards, tornados, drought, food system collapse, imperial war, white-supremacist violence, the murder of Black people and people of color by police, border detentions, houselessness. Meanwhile, we're entering a third summer marked by COVID-19 surges, as the US government and society have decided that the best policy for mitigating the virus is simply to pretend it does not exist, as if it were some boogeyman under the bed.

And we don our N95s (or don't) to brave the smoke and the virus. We burn fossil fuels commuting to work, where we sit alone on laptops emailing each other. The Federal minimum wage hasn't increased since 2009 (while it has since lost 21% of its value), and the state refuses to provide for basic needs for all. On our resumes, filed under "Other Skills," we cite our "resiliency," the ability to cope with sustained trauma, a marketable asset. Ever-increasing capital is extracted from our labor. It moves up the ladder to the top where it sits, accumulating and reproducing, hoarded by the beneficiaries of a politics of death.

The apocalypse is already here. We're living through it, now. As I write this. As you read this. It's all around us; we just choose, most days, to ignore it. We're already dead: a swarm of walking corpses shambling toward our doom, unable, or unwilling, to change course, mindlessly heading toward oblivion.

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I took the three seeds home. I placed them in pots of soil dug from my yard and nestled them into the mud. I watered them, and placed them in mottled shade. I waited. After some time—days, weeks—a new root appeared from one, thrust into the clay. Soon, a root extended from the third, beneath the edge of the soil. The second-to-root suddenly and without warning unfurled a stalk complete with fully formed branches and leaves: a curling arm reaching upward. The third-to-root disappeared one night—pulled its foot out of the soil and walked away; gone. The first-to-root cracked open upon a seam and began a slow reaching, one hand straining out from the seam, then a second, pulling apart a gap in the root flesh, reaching up and out uncoiling one arm and then another, stretching like a creature kept locked within too-small a chamber finally released. Blinking its eyes at the light. Taking its time. It is still the beginning, and middle, and end of their stories, and ours.

In Connie's nascent zombie narrative, the remedy for one's zombification is to turn one's body into a garden: to grow plants in the decomposing matter of the flesh, a radical act of restoration. Perhaps this is one path forward: to proclaim oneself a zombie—a being without willpower, without agency, serving only capital—and through that acknowledgement begin the process of healing; begin planting seeds in one's flesh, and growing something new.

"In the end, no matter what we do or how we live, we too must die and come back and be just like them. Zombies are our only possible future, our already actual present; zombies inherit the earth."
—Gerry Canavan, "We Are the Walking Dead: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative"