Deep Time
The exhibition Deep Time includes paintings and collage that explore the contrast of human time and deep time through geology, deep space, and the contemporary landscape as I contemplate the significance of our own brief lives and their long-lasting actions.
The paper collages are made with images cut from decades-old books about minerals, the TIME Life “Library of Photography” series, mid-century texts about land preservation and state parks, and Christie’s Auction House catalogs for Meteors and Fossils. As I cut each meteor out of its page- which lists a starting price for the auction which will go to the highest bidder- my wonder and awe of the natural world sits in tension with the capitalist reality of personal ownership and endless acquisition. I also collect evocative phrases from these books as titles for artworks: "strange hues from a dark sky", "crystalized motion, visible time", "the reversed world".
In “Obtaining Infinite Depth of Field”, paintings of crystallographic x-rays, the heavens, meteors, and an eclipse, are situated within a mural of the rural Kentucky landscape that my father's family farmed and care-took for over a century before resources were sold off and the land was strip mined. No longer a straightforward landscape painting, this elegiac image operates as memento mori (“remember you must die”).
This work allows me to cultivate a particular quality of attentiveness, both through research and the slowness of this painting process. The grief of living in the anthropocene underscores my love and longing for the world.