Pease, Silvia. Cardos (Thistles) video, 03:22 m, Repair, group exhibition co curated by Jones and Metzer.
David Dupuy Studios, NYC, New York, April 2025
 

Pease, Silvia. Cardos No.1, No.2, No.3. Archival prints on paper, variable sizes, 2025

 

In Cardos (Thistles), the video considers nature less as backdrop than as an active agent, tracing the uneasy intimacy between ecological processes and human systems of meaning. Centered on the thistle, historically coded as invasive or undesirable, the work reframes the plant as a figure of persistence, regeneration, and adaptive strength. Rather than proposing repair as an act of intervention or control, Cardos advances a quieter proposition: that restoration emerges through attention to natural cycles of growth, decay, and return.

The thistle appears not as an isolated organism but as part of a dense, collective ecology. Its capacity to thrive through entanglement becomes a lens through which the work reflects on social life, emphasizing interdependence over autonomy. In this parallel between botanical and human communities, resilience is understood as relational, sustained through cooperation and shared vulnerability. By lingering on what is often overlooked or dismissed, the work invites a reconsideration of repair, not as correction, but as coexistence.

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