Jemila MacEwan: Dead Gods

_Dead Gods_ is conceived as a living monument honoring prehistoric interspecies as sacred deities. Created by Jemila MacEwan—a conceptual artist whose durational works and installations draw upon geological, ecological, and evolutionary processes—the sculptures are made of fungi mycelium. In scale and presence, they invoke Prototaxites, an extinct genus of towering, trunk-like organisms that inhabited Earth between 420 and 375 million years ago. They are understood by scientists to make up an entirely distinct kingdom of organisms that once enabled the proliferation of life on Earth. By creating this work, MacEwan recalls a time long before the human-caused mass extinction of animal and plant species.