Excavations (3), Hope In The Dark Photograph

Rocks are alive. Excited by the idea that rocks hold truths in an age of disinformation, I began tearing and burning into my photographs of landscapes, layering them over and over until new spaces emerged. These fissures and cracks make room for connections between the earth and its inhabitants, between the past and future possibilities. EXCAVATIONS explores the complicated role the camera plays in our violent, troubled past and present, and the way systems of oppression perpetuate the Anthropocene. Archival images from American magazines such as Life and National Geographic reveal entrenched ideologies about race, gender, and our relationship to nature, animals, and the planet. The omnipresence of danger, and the urgency to control (the narrative, the body, the earth, the animal) found in these pages, are pervasive and loud themes. When I began making this work, the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of the world, was intentionally set on fire to clear land for cattle raising. In the natural world fire drives a cycle of destruction and rebirth. Indigenous peoples mirrored this rhythm, nurturing ecological diversity and maintaining equilibrium by harnessing fire’s remarkable power to restart natural systems. Burned pages also reminds us of hate groups burning books, and how the burning of fossil fuels is destroying all habitats and most people’s ways of life. There is a violence and unpredictability to fire, as there is to erasure. But fire can heal, and metaphorically has the power to burn down unjust frameworks. Fire can usher into existence new perspectives and approaches to modernity. Fire can provide hope in dark times.