MYCELIUM RISING begins with a vision I've had for years: connecting mushroom artists and the many people equally obsessed with fungi. Mycelium has earned a reputation of being this connective entity underground - thriving and giving, communicating, and yet remaining quite mysterious, all through the symbiotic nature of mycorrhizal fungi. As I continue to make my own work and connect with other fungi enthusiasts, I realize more and more how much of a moment fungi are having. Once you start looking, you can't stop seeing how many of us have been gradually, separately, obsessively drawn into the world of fungi in one way or another. This exhibition is a gathering of a few of those people. Some found their way here through fungi directly - some inspired to create fashion, drag characters, beautiful eerie photography, psychedelic paintings, light installations, medicinal, mushroom cultivation, or to collaborate directly with one of fungi's friends, myxomycetes (aka slime mould) to make time-lapse videos. Others arrived by way of water, fungi's oldest and most essential ally, the medium through which mycelial networks breathe, travel, and reach. What attracts so many of us creatives, is that fungi are so diverse themselves They are functional and mysterious in the same breath. In medicine, they're being studied for their capacity to heal - but they can also kill. In architecture, mycelium is being grown into building material, insulation, even furniture. In mushroom leather and fungal dyes are becoming a sustainable material. And in the realm of the psychedelic and the mysterious, fungi have always had their place in ancient cultures, being one of the oldest living species of which without them, we would not exist. Having survived 5 mass extinctions, they adapt, they decay, they connect entire forests underground in networks we're still only beginning to map (thanks S.P.U.N.). Every artist in this show is responding to some piece of that - the wonder, the utility, the strangeness, or all three at once. What ties the work together isn't a shared material or medium. It's a shared instinct toward connection: the understanding that we are not separate from nature, that we all live in symbiosis to one another and to our mother earth. I believe that paying attention to something as small as a mushroom can change how we think about everything larger - our bodies, our cities, our relationships to one another and to our beloved mother earth. Mycelium Rising is an invitation to see fungi through our different lenses and realize we are all connected. Welcome to the underground. - Sharlene Durfey François - Curator