In Spoils, Arizona-based artist Aaron Rothman transforms the gallery into an immersive environment of richly patterned textiles, furnishings, photographs, and decorative objects that considers how our ways of representing nature are entangled with the ways we alter it. Drawing inspiration from the elaborate floral textiles and decorative traditions that circulated throughout Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, Rothman considers how the desire to represent, possess, and control nature became intertwined with expanding systems of industrialization, global trade, and resource extraction.

The flora-inspired patterns that adorned domestic interiors celebrated an abundant and seemingly controllable vision of nature, even as the production and circulation of those objects depended upon increasingly fraught systems of resource, labor, and consumption. Rothman brings this history into conversation with contemporary landscapes shaped by climate change and human intervention. Beginning with his own photographs of ecologically disturbed environments—specifically wildfire-affected landscapes in the Sierra Nevada mountains—he digitally manipulates the images into intricate patterns that are woven into textiles and incorporated into furnishings and other designed objects.

At once inviting and unsettling, Spoils blurs the distinctions between landscape and interior, photograph and object, and the natural and artificial. Situated between past and future, the exhibition considers our current realities while questioning how inherited ideas of nature have helped shape them. Just as the objects of the past reveal something about the values of the cultures that produced them, Spoils asks what the environments taking shape around us today might reveal about our own.

Organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Keshia Turley, assistant curator.