CCA Student Series
Jonah Reenders
In collaboration with California College of the Arts, ICA SF invited CCA Graduate Fine Arts students to propose creative exhibitions in unconventional spaces around the museum. Jonah Reenders is the seventh CCA artist featured so far.
The earth has always kept its own time, long before modern man-made measuring techniques. Artist Jonah Reenders captured images of the striking Icelandic landscape on his recent trip there researching tephrochronology—the ability to map geological events using tephra, or volcanic ash. As the land was shaped by everything from massive volcanic eruptions and floods, to smaller phenomena like decaying insects and wildlife migration, a timeline stretching back billions of years emerged in the layers of earth beneath us.
In his solo exhibition TEPHRA/Garden of Fireflies, Reenders creates images of and with the land and its wildlife, imagining them as organic traces of a geologic record unaltered by humanity and questioning our increasingly removed relationship to the earth. In these delicate images, exhibited as a nontraditional timeline, viewers are confronted with our own relatively new existence within the context of deep time.
In collaboration with California College of the Arts, ICA SF invited CCA Graduate Fine Arts students to propose creative exhibitions in unconventional spaces around the museum. Jonah Reenders is the seventh CCA artist featured so far.
In honor of Peter Simensky, a beloved mentor, collaborator, and advocate.
This project is organized by Samantha Hiura, ICA SF Curatorial Fellow, CCA MA Curatorial Practice & MA Visual Critical Studies ‘25.
Jonah Reenders is an artist interested in the relationship between humanity and the natural world. His perspective is shaped by a nuanced understanding of scientific observation, identity, and connection. After graduating with a BS in Environmental Science, he worked as a biologist for almost a decade. Collecting data through imagery, he weaves together formative narratives that seek to question our ecological understanding.