Narendra Haynes

I have a series of new paintings on view @pearlsteingallery through May 22nd. Check out Conflagrations if you are int the Philly area this week. 1. Rapture in Red 2. The One With the Flaming Tongue 3. Burn Out Drift Off 4. Spiritus Ignus

Also in Conflagrations, Narendra Haynes. Check out his monumental installation as you enter the gallery, as well as his paintings in conversation with the other three artists in the show. The last slide shows his paintings alongside a sculpture by @emsoruiz @neranderthal is a Philadelphia-based painter and sculptor whose practice explores anthropocentric ideologies and material practices in the context of environmental crisis. Rooted in eco-phenomenology and animist visions of living land, he collaborates with non-human animals, plants, and elemental forces to make fully embodied works that disorient narratives of human superiority, mastery, progress, and control. Haynes received his BFA from the Cooper Union and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania where he was also awarded a Certificate in Emerging Design and Research. He has been artist in residence at RAIR, Philadelphia, and Culture Factory Polymer, Estonia. His work has been supported by grants from the Joseph Roberts Foundation and the Halpern-Rogath Travel Award. He has exhibited in Philadelphia, at The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, The Asian Arts Initiative, Icebox Project Space, and Big Ramp Gallery, as well as the Fort Hayes Shot Tower Gallery at the University of Ohio, and the Poetry Project in New York City.

I’m so excited and grateful to have the opportunity to show this piece @pearlsteingallery opening this Wednesday 5-7pm All That Burns, All That Is Alive (2024) I conceived this work while wandering through forests wrapped in a vision of the living world as confluences of nested ecologies. Bodies inside of bodies, spiraling from micro to macro, overlapping, porous, in constant exchange and ongoing metamorphosis—feeding, growing, dying, feeding. Fire on the land became my lens for exploring how arboreal ecosystems participate in this intimate dance of death, regrowth, and transformation, a necro-genesis of green shoots fed by charred trunks and ashen soils. Utilizing processed laminate wood, synthetic PVC panels, and living plant life, this work repurposes a common modular shelf system to create a polymorphic body impacted by fire. In shifting visual registers, its form moves from charred landscape, to smoky sky, to fallen tree, evoking fire’s presence and aftermath at varying scales and vantage points. Fire releases the toxicity of plastics and peals back laminate surfaces to reveal hidden dimensions of these industrialized wood substitutes. Living moss and ferns grow from cracks as “first returners” after a landscape burns, avatars of primal life and natures irrepressible vitality. The polluted land and sky that our overconsumption and industrial control regimes produce, is nested within the image of a giant fallen tree, evoking the larger NATURAL cycles of death and renewal that the “Anthropocene” (as-wildfire) participates in. Ultimately we are still the land enacting itself in grand patterns of expansion and contraction that we can neither fathom nor control. …and the world remains an open mystery for us to wonder at… #ecoart #regeneration #animism #wonder

Conflagrations, a group show featuring recent works by Viola Bordon, Evan Curtis Charles Hall, Narendra Haynes, and Emmanuela Soria Ruiz, investigates fire as force, event, and aftermath. Moving between active burn and residual trace, the artists ask how we might respond to fire’s capacity to clear, consume, reveal, and reorder. As fire increasingly shapes our ecological context, these works reflect on how fire constructs and destroys in the same gesture, reshaping ecologies, infrastructures, and collective memory. What burns. What survives. What returns. @PearlsteinGallery - 3401 Filbert St. Philadelphia, PA Opening reception April 8, 2026 from 5:00-7:30pm. @violabordon @evan.hall @neranderthal @emsoruiz

JOIN US for the opening reception for our Spring Exhibitions: Collective Landscapes and Conflagrations. Collective Landscapes: Photographs by @ludakiewicz and Textiles by @marisvanvlack brings together two artists who mine collective histories to investigate the impacts of time, disinvestment, and conflict on architectural landscapes. Ludak’s photography takes inspiration from his grandmother’s life amidst the rugged towns of Western Pennsylvania's coal-mining communities, expanding his lens to capture current themes of urban and rural life amongst spaces ridden by structural neglect. In her multifaceted practice, Van Vlack uses textile, sculpture, and collage practices to create tapestries that investigate the impacts of war and weather on landscapes from her family’s history. Her unique layering techniques mirror the cycles of accumulation, entropy, and regeneration on the built environment over time. Conflagrations, a group show featuring recent works by @violabordon , @evan.hall , @neranderthal , and @emsoruiz , investigates fire as force, event, and aftermath. Moving between active burn and residual trace, the artists ask how we might respond to fire's capacity to clear, consume, reveal, and reorder. As fire increasingly shapes our ecological context, these works reflect on how fire constructs and destroys in the same gesture, reshaping ecologies, infrastructures, and collective memory. What burns. What survives. What returns.

Introducing Narendra Haynes, one of the panelists for tonight’s virtual NatureCulture Dialogue session focusing on the topic of Sympoiesis and Interdependence with the nonhuman world! About the artist: Narendra Haynes (@neranderthal ) is an interdisciplinary artist who engages in interspecies collaboration to explore human exceptionalism and the ecological crisis. Working with mealworms to repurpose and decompose Styrofoam waste, Haynes produces paintings, sculptures, videos and installations that challenge us to think differently about the material conditions of our shared planet and our relationship to non-human life. Haynes was born in Detroit, MI, and received his BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. As an MFA student at The University of Pennsylvania he received the Stuart Egnal Scholarship Award and earned a Certificate in Emerging Design and Research. First slide: “Adrift on the Floating Island”, a work by the artist featured in the recent exhibition “Sympoiesis”. Photograph courtesy of show curator Doosung Yoo. Event information: 📅 Date: Wednesday, January 28th, 2026 from 4:00 pm-5:20pm EST 📍Zoom: https://osu.zoom.us/j/98694113336?pwd=Zfy3dW5RFeXXyjFhX6aSnA8Uha8Ln8.1

Looking forward to conversing with Emma Kline and sharing my work and thoughts on interdependence along with @ks.brewer and @fionaabell Thank you @ecoart.osu for hosting the Nature Culture Dialogues in conjunction with the Sympoiesis exhibition.

Hey folks. We Are All Compost is on view @bigrampphilly for just a couple more weeks with a closing reception April 19 2-4pm. Link in bio for details and gallery hours. Hope you can join. It’s been a pleasure exhibiting with this group of like minded artists dedicated to the land, and working towards healing our relationship with it. Big thanks to @wschwaller for bringing us together and giving curatorial context to our shared values and ideas. It’s a great little show that really breaths life into the space and allows the lives of the objects to shine through. If you don’t already know them, check out these incredible Philly artists: Cindy Stockton Moore @nicholevanbeek @violabordon @bobby.haskell.art @rschultzartist

The title Future Ancestors came to me when I was collecting decomposed styrofoam powder from my mealworm farm to use as the ground upon which this tree sculpture would rest. I encountered a graveyard of beetle corpses, all gathered in one area. It struck me that about eleven generations of darkling beetles had been born, molted, mated, procreated, lived, and died here since I started this farm four years ago. These were the ancestral remains of all the living mealworms that had been inhabiting, eating, and decomposing this same collection of styrofoam—this same piece of becoming-land—all this time! I felt the depths of past and future pulled into the tangible present, a sensation I often experience when witnessing the relatively rapid decay of plastic that the mealworms enact. I thought, They are future ancestors. This phrase resonates with many aspects of the work: it’s tree form, a representation of familial lineage, connecting us to our human and more-than-human ancestors, it’s techno-futuristic vocabulary of bulking forms like an abandoned mega-colony in a post human wasteland; its ambivalent reflection on what kind of stewards we are being for future generations. Are we a fallen tree, and will our bodies contaminate the world or decompose into vital soil? The answer is far from clear. This work is part of We Are All Compost, on view @bigrampphilly through April 19. See link in bio for details and hours.

We Are All Compost opens @bigrampphilly this Saturday from 5-9pm! I can’t wait to show what my mealworms have accomplished in the last couple years, munching away at the styrofoam in my basement! They have fully habited this material and transformed so much of its synthetic body into organic earth. I tried to make a sculpture that honors the significance of their ongoing labor and what it means to live entangled lives in this toxic time. I’m so excited to show with a group of brilliant artists, some of whose work I got to see at the gallery when I installed last night! It’s going to be a really fun and provocative show featuring sculpture, and video in the gallery and courtyard. @bobby.haskell.art @violabordon @rschultzartist Cindy Stockton Moore @nicholevanbeek

As the wildfires continue to rage, devastating precious communities, ecosystems, and infrastructure in Los Angeles, we are reflecting on our exhibition Fire Season, which closes this week on Friday, January 17th, and more generally on the role of art in crisis. Our artists in the show, Narendra Haynes @neranderthal and Ye Qin Zhu @ye.zhu_ contend with the very real and prescient reality of the destructive magnification of fire on Earth. Through their connective thinking, they offer us pathways for shifting public consciousness and gleaning the wisdom necessary to survive environmental catastrophe and failing systems. Before the show closes, we wanted to highlight Ye Qin Zhu’s piece, Sight, Taste, Appetite, a large-scale mixed media assemblage, centering a human skeletal form in the process of digestion at once emerging from and being swallowed by billows of fire. Ye Qin Zhu, Sight, Taste, Appetite, 2022 Mixed media on panel The format of this mixed media work is inspired by mythological relief carvings of Hindu and Buddhist temples. Zhu’s sculptural mythology integrates carved imagery of flames with embedded artifacts and detritus from today’s manmade and natural world. The central figure blends skeleton and flesh, crowned in gold as in a saintly icon, gazing back at the viewer. The figure’s tongue references taste, which the artist conflates beyond the sensory to the subjective personal tastes, such as literature and media. The flames that consume the scene reflect the broader concept of consumption and the natural cycle of the human body which is ultimately consumed into the environment. You can visit the Schuylkill Center to see Fire Season from October 12th, 2024 – January 17th, 2025, on Monday – Saturday, between 9-5pm. (Photos @bastiaan_slabbers / for the Schuylkill Center of Environmental Education)