“Hides have been inscribed with cultural significance for millennia: this occurs quite literally, as their use as parchment has been a way to preserve knowledge, and through their essential function as a means for survival in the form of clothing or mobile shelters. Throughout his long artistic engagement with leather, the artist Rindon Johnson has continuously highlighted the medium as a site of interaction between the body and its environment – a contested boundary between the individual and the social. As the art historian Thomas Love explicates, contrary to the material’s possibly life-sustaining qualities, Johnson’s solo exhibition at GUTS uses cowhide to suggest how our skin becomes embroiled in inhospitable systems and to confront bodies with the necropolitics of industrial production, colonial as well as neocolonial extraction, and climate change.”