Clarissa Tossin: To Take Root among the Stars

The first monograph on the work of a multimedia artist exploring environmental destruction across the United States and Latin America LA-based Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin (born 1973) employs film, sculpture and drawing to explore the intersections of climate change and global capitalism’s frontier mythologies. Published by the Frye Art Museum, this catalog presents an overview of Tossin’s career through full-color reproductions of works that span from 2008 to 2023, including images of several new artworks commissioned by the Frye. The exhibition borrows its title from science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s Earthseed novels, in which humans seek to survive amid ecological and cultural apocalypse. Tossin’s new works explore mapping and naming as colonial technologies of discovery and conquest on Earth and beyond. Through their seamless melding of synthetic and organic materials, the artist’s works embody the tension between ecological destruction and the caretaking approaches of Indigenous communities. Essays by curator Vic Brooks, writer Leslie Dick and exhibition curator Georgia Erger offer intimate assessments of the artist’s practice at a timely moment.