Our first salon explores the symbols of American Cyborg. It takes its name from the generative relationship between a shared network of meaning and the meaning-makers who create, interpret, and transform it.
Symbols are among humanity's oldest technologies. Across places, cultures, and generations, we have developed ways to communicate ideas that exceed the limits of language: through geometry, gesture, ornament, ritual, and material form. These symbolic systems are neither isolated nor universal. They emerge from particular histories and communities, traveling through networks of exchange, adaptation, inheritance, and invention.
Symbolic Symbiotic brings together artworks and objects that explore these relationships. Some draw upon longstanding sacred traditions; others develop new vocabularies from the shared experiences of artists and collaborators. Some are made to be contemplated, others to be worn, encountered, or activated through participation. Together, they ask how symbols acquire meaning, how that meaning is transmitted, and what happens when symbols enter new contexts.
The salon also considers the relationship between individual expression and collective knowledge. No artist works outside history, and no symbol belongs entirely to a single moment. Artistic traditions are sustained by communities of makers, interpreters, and caretakers whose contributions are not always equally visible or acknowledged. We seek to celebrate cultural specificity while recognizing the interconnectedness of human intellectual and artistic life, attending to histories of exchange as well as appropriation, erasure, and unequal power.
Peridot Green approaches its own history as a palimpsest: a living accumulation of artworks, texts, conversations, and interpretations. Rather than replacing earlier meanings with new ones, we preserve their traces and invite further readings. The objects gathered here have histories before and beyond this exhibition, and their relationships continue to change as new participants encounter them.
At the heart of Symbolic Symbiotic is a proposition: meaning is neither fixed within an object nor invented by an individual alone. It emerges through relationships.
The salon is an invitation to participate in those relationships, to consider the symbols we inherit and those we create, and to imagine how a shared language might remain open to difference, transformation, and discovery.