Work by Jacob Reptile & Calder Kamin

Curated by Micah Mermilliod

Handle with Care is a new interactive exhibition exploring all the potential of what we take for granted. In a partnership exhibition originated by Alabama Contemporary for the Mobile Museum of Art, artists Calder Kamin (Austin, TX) and Jacob Reptile (New Orleans, LA) transform trash into soft and complex sculptures to create a new kind of environment. Through purposeful reuse of fabrics, plastics, and second-hand materials, these artists create new alien lifeforms, flora and fauna, to populate an imagined landscape.

The space they have created speaks to local ecology, the environmental impact of waste, and inspires a playful consideration of what we produce through industry. Everything here was once discarded, now re-purposed into a mythical topography that celebrates vibrant and unfettered growth, and invites viewers to inhabit the exhibition as they consider how we inhabit the natural world we live in.

Everything has been touched by human hands, and can be touched. Everything can find purpose with a little imagination, and the work of making a sustainable planet can also happen through play. 

Generous funding for Alabama Contemporary curatorial projects and related programming is provided by: