PLATO

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We are delighted to announce Eleanor Mahin Thorp's inaugural solo exhibition at PLATO, Bend of the Southern Cross, opening with a public reception at our lower gallery on Friday, September 5 from 6 to 8pm, and on view from August 30 through October 4.

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The work of the Brooklyn-based artist examines how landscapes are abstracted and reimagined through extraction and mythology. Bend of the Southern Cross is the result of Thorp's research in the Atacama region in northern Chile, one of the driest and most mineral-rich regions on Earth, positioned at the heart of the "lithium triangle" spanning Chile, Bolivia and Peru, a repository of copper and lithium — key resources in the global transition to renewable energy, AI infrastructures and digital technologies. Through this project, the artist asks, "If we fully understood the animistic and ecological intelligence of such landscapes, would we still be willing to sacrifice them for profit and progress?"

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Informed by her studies of the region’s history, conversations with local activists and on-site photos and sketches, Thorp layers pigment and mineral matter to reconstruct strata and surfaces, co-creating with the subject itself. For instance, We Met Before Flamingoes features salt growths on the stone surface of the painting, a reminder of the symbiosis of various ecosystems in Atacama. The valleys in the region house cyanobacteria that eat away at the brines and minerals found in the stone and salt strata. These bacteria emit an enormous amount of oxygen, not unlike rainforests. The Atacama is over 200 million years old, and its salt pools have remained stable since before the Dinosaurs Age. These ancient landscapes are now under threat, yet for the moment they are preserved thanks to local advocacy groups. 

 

The Lican Antay people have resorted to long-standing myths poeticising Atacama as a preservation tool for safeguarding the valley between Licancabur and Qimal mountains against lithium mining. Licancabur is a dominating male volcano willing to blast off the head of his brother for the love of Qimal — all three anthropomorphised peaks are featured in In the Shadows of Two Lovers. Poetic stories charge the terrain with meaning, an example of how heritage and cosmology can become active agents of ecological care.

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The title of the exhibition, Bend of the Southern Cross, comes from a passage in Jim Harrison’s novel, Legends of the Fall, where he reflects on tragedy, colonial violence and the grotesque intersection of innocence and destruction. Harrison imagines the Southern Cross constellation drooping at the horrors witnessed below — a poignant image when situated in the Atacama, one of the clearest places on Earth to view the stars. Here, international observatories gaze into the universe while, below, ancient ground is strip-mined to power our digital futures. 

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Recurring throughout Thorp’s practice is the idea of deserts as misunderstood, maligned spaces. Raised in Utah, with its salt flats and red rock, and connected through heritage to the deserts of Iran, she has often witnessed how language shapes perception. Deserts are labeled “lifeless,” “empty,” “desolate” — a rhetoric that legitimizes their extraction or commodification. In Visage, Thorp depicts the Devil’s Throat, a place that was named by the Spanish colonizers. Such naming practices, common across the Americas, project human anxieties onto land, turning spiritual and ancestral places into territories to be dominated. Yet deserts, she has come to see, teem with forms of life, energy and history. In this kaleidoscopic painting, figures and patterns emerge and dissolve. The land, once demonized, returns our gaze and challenges us to change perspectives.

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During her time in the Atacama, Thorp encountered many pyramids and triangles made of copper, some created by artists, others occurring naturally. Copper pyramids, often associated with healing, contrast with the violence of extraction in the “lithium triangle.” Momentum Relations depicts one pyramid incorporated into the landscape, with its entrance bearing patterns of human footprints — a sign of reverence and curiosity. The triangle becomes a psychic and an ecological symbol, a form through which both destruction and healing coexist.

 

In Downswing, the yellow lithium brine in a mine resembles a stock market graph — visual evidence of the collision between geology and capitalism. The transmuted earth becomes a fluctuating digital abstraction. Meanwhile, A Whisper explores the auditory eeriness of desert canyons when echoes bouncing off of cliffs arouse strange feelings, similarly to the “uncanny valley” effect used in the context of robotics and CGI, when humans recognize something as almost real, yet experience feelings of unease or revulsion. For some, the canyon evokes this biophobia. For the artist, “it is a special voice, one that echoes profound secrets.”

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Eagle Eyed speaks to geology’s communicative power, drawing from Thorp’s personal lineage – her mother reads coffee grounds to predict the future, a tradition the artist reimagines through stone. Symbols, figures and messages emerge from rock faces, reminiscent of the Zoroastrian concept of Fravashi, or ancestral spirits. The work engages directly with the physicality of stone and mineral, mimicking their weight and surface structure. Some areas resemble specific landforms; others abstract into symbolic languages, numeric sequences or linguistic fragments — suggesting how landscape informs human language, mythology and even written forms. Through her oeuvre Thorp keeps wondering, "If we considered that our ability to think, imagine and transform the land comes from the land itself, would we continue exploiting it? Would we be willing to trade our precious water resources and ancient oxygen-making bacteria for a rechargeable battery?"

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The works in this exhibition are not driven by environmental fatalism. Rather, they explore the metaphysical power embedded in geology. They acknowledge the dark history of colonial violence and extractive capitalism while elevating the mythic and life-forming qualities of the land. At the heart of Bend of the Southern Cross is a call to listen — to geology, to myth, to local knowledge, to ancestral memory. In an age where the Earth is mined to feed machines that simulate intelligence, perhaps it’s time to recognize the ancient, animate intelligence of the land itself.

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Eleanor Mahin Thorp (b. 1998) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY, who grew up in Utah. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA from Weber State University. Her solo exhibitions include Friends of My Luonto, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA (2025); Metopic Ridge, Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, Washington, DC (2023); Earth Blossom, dual Exhibition with Ali Kaeini, 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA (2023) and Blast Zone, The Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA (2022).

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Thorp has completed residencies, including Yellowstone Art Museum (2025); Wassaic Projects, La Wayaka, Monson Arts, Banff Centre (2024); Arteles (2023) and Visual Arts Center of Richmond (2022). She is the recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Art Fellowship (2023), the VCU Arts Faculty Research Grant (2023) and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts Artist Fellowship (2023). She has been a nominee of the Catherine Doctorow Prize in Contemporary Painting (2025), a semi finalist of the Trackwick Prize (2022) and the Hopper Prize finalist (2020). Thorpe was featured on Yellowstone Public Radio in 2025. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post and published in Anarchist Review of Books. She currently teaches at City College at City University of New York. 

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