Folding Digital Tabloid 11.5 x 15"
4 Pages, 55gsm
Design by Kristen Mallia
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dirt (2–Person Exhibition with Don Eyles)
April 21–May 30, 2025
Gallery at 249 A Street, Boston, MA
 
About the exhibition
dirt is a first collaboration between Don Eyles and Kristen Mallia, on view from April 21 to May 30, 2025. The exhibition merges each artist’s distinct approach to archiving concepts of landscape through photography, organic matter, and multimedia installation. Dirt invites viewers to contemplate themes of consumption, collection, and transformation within their own “home” sites, and consider the way our intimate relationships with place inform our collective histories.
 
Eyles’s photographic grids portray the excavation, re-arrangement, transformation, and transport of landscape during Boston’s Big Dig, recorded from 1993–2005. Organic materiality is amplified through its juxtaposition with machinery and concrete in these disrupted, reframed cityscapes. Mallia’s arrangements of meticulously labeled jars display home-composted dirt as data visualization, recording the artist’s kitchen habits and studio rituals since April 11, 2022. Printed records supplement the installation. 
 
Guests are invited to bring household food and plant scraps to the gallery as part of a collaborative, on-site composting installation that will evolve over the course of the exhibition. All contributors will be credited for their collaboration in the publication that will follow. Thank you to Lomi for generously donating a Lomi 2 home composting machine for this exhibition.
 
Don Eyles is a photographer, former rocket scientist, and author based in Boston; his work inhabits the zone where art and engineering are indistinguishable. After graduating from the Boston University School of Liberal Arts in 1966, Eyles worked at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory where he created software that helped guide the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon. He was the recipient of NASA’s Public Service Award for his role in solving a problem during the Apollo 14 mission, and he invented a software system that is used today by the International Space Station. Eyles also builds floating geometrical sculptures for the Fort Point Channel. His book, Sunburst and Luminary, an Apollo Memoir, was published in 2018 by Fort Point Press.
 
Kristen Mallia’s work examines the evolution and accumulation of behaviors and structures over time through ritual, collection, site-specific research, and self-publishing. She holds an MFA from Boston University, a BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design, and a BA from The George Washington University. She has held Artist Residencies at ArtsIceland in Ísafjörður, Iceland, Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, L’Appartamento Napoli, in Naples, Italy, and Aviário Studio, in Ferreira do Zêzere, Portugal; her work has been exhibited internationally. Mallia is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Suffolk University.
 
Gallery at 249 A is an evolving project of the 249 A Street Cooperative, one of Massachusetts’s first limited-equity live/work cooperatives for artists. The Gallery at 249 A is partly supported by a South Boston Community Development Foundation grant. Generous support for this exhibition’s printed matter has been provided by Gallery at 249 A and Midway Artist Studios.