Join us for First Friday in November, when we will open the exhibition ESX/COCA featuring work by Alexandra McNichols-Torroledo in Aurora’s Efroymson Gallery. Over the last decade, Colombian-born photographer Alexandra McNichols-Torroledo has focused her work on the indigenous communities of North and South America who protect sacred plants, water, and the rainforest. The exhibition ESX/COCA presents images that McNichols-Torroledo made at the Wasak Kwewesx School in the Nasa indigenous reservation of Toribio, Cauca, Colombia.

At the school, Nasa children are educated in the medicinal ancient rites of the coca plant and their relation to weaving and spinning practices done with the cabuya plant. Cabuya fiber is considered by the Nasa people “the hair of mother earth,” and it is as sacred to the Nasa as the coca plant. Classes at the Wasak Kwewesx School are led by a traditional doctor called ‘the Wala’ who educates children to become traditional doctors, midwives, and cultural leaders to ensure continuity of the Nasa culture.

The beautiful prints in ESX/COCA were made using the platinum-palladium process, a contact printing process originating from the 1870s. This exhibition will be on view in Aurora’s Efroymson Gallery until December 15.

In Aurora’s Main Gallery until December 15
: Jessica Hays started photographing wildfires after a fire burned the foothills of her hometown in Montana in 2020. Since then, Hays has traveled the American Southwest to create the series The Sun Sets Midafternoon, which captures the state of solastalgia, an emotional and existential distress caused by negative environmental change. The exhibition combines immersive, floor-to-ceiling mural prints of fire clouds, large-scale framed photographs of fires, and the artist’s written word to deliver an urgent reminder of our world’s fragility.