Janelle VanderKelen
Language Unknown embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans, who are far more sensorially limited. Leaves, mycelium, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of humans might possibly understand.
Janelle VanderKelen is an artist, curator, and educator currently based in Milwaukee, WI. Her films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of the relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological, or otherwise) and make visible the agency of plants through experimental time-based media processes.