Necropolitics Etc.

November 12, 2019

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Anthropocentrism is not necessarily the enemy, and has in fact enabled
healthier forms of necropolitics as well as environmental consciousness
itself. Historically, it has been a key element in the persuasive rhetoric of
those who truly care for the environment, and it has helped their arguments resonate with potential allies. Anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism are the foundation of empathy, connectedness, and investment in the natural world. To be sure, they are not useful concepts for scientific study, but they are of great use in poetics and aesthetics. Much of ecological struggle is being fought in this nonrational territory—which leads us next to ask: Is there a human tendency toward the nonrational?

  • In Praise of Shadows – Junichiro Tanizaki (A 1930’s era essay regarding Japanese aesthetics…with heavy emphasis on the preference for the dimly lit).

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Sleeper.Studio/Silver Eye Book Fair

October 7, 2019

I am starting a new studio practice with two long time friends and photographers that I greatly respect. Sleeper.studio is a publishing project working with photography, design, and text to realize artists’ ideas in printed form.  Our interests lie in cultivating a fluid studio practice that values open, collaborative and equitable relationships with artists.

Sleeper is Ben Alper, Peter Hoffman and Ross Mantle. It currently operates out of Durham, NC and Pittsburgh, PA.

We had a (very) soft launch over the weekend at Silver Eye Book Fair in Pittsburgh where the three of us sold work that we had all previously done and previewed some of our upcoming projects.

Please head over to the new website and sign up for the mailing list if you’re curious about what’s in the pipeline. This new collaborative venture will supplant my own personal photo book practice for the foreseeable future. Though our focus is mostly on the work of other artists, the three of us continue to make our own pictures and will likely publish some of our own work through from time to time.

Photo-Emphasis, Recent Group Shows

September 17, 2019

Thanks to the people over at Photo-Emphasis for talking to me about some of my recent work. See here for the interview and images.

I also recently returned from the aforementioned Useful Fictions symposium near Paris. See this post in research for a bit more information. This resulted in being part of a small group show at Galerie HUS in Montmartre.

Additionally, I recently had a piece at Sky High Skies curated by Anthony Hamilton at Transpace Gallery in Bloomington, IL.

Useful Fictions

September 17, 2019

I recently returned from a week long Art+Science symposium at École Polytechnique outside of Paris that was held in conjunction with faculty from UC Davis. Working in a lab for a week with physicists Jean Marc-Chomaz (of the Polytechnique) and Prof. Steward Dalziel (Cambridge University) as well as other graduate fellows and assistants we considered how to use art and science to respond to the prompt of “A Microclimate of One.”

Making any finished art project in such a compressed period of time is quite a task, but we ultimately ended with using Dalziel’s invention of synthetic Schlieren Photography that images heat radiating off of a person’s skin was a fascinating start. Without getting too much into detail, we created a photo-booth style set up that would let people be imaged in a way where the boundaries of their body aren’t hard set anymore, which has a lot of metaphorical potential. Here’s to hoping we can refine the work over the course of time. We’ll see.

Also, so much good new music as of late:

Down to Earth

August 9, 2019

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I’ve been going through a lot of writing about the political climate surrounding climate change over the past few years. This work is maybe the most impactful thus far. It’s a cogent argument for reorienting global left/right politics and argues (as other writers have emphasized) to consider our actions as part of one terrestrial body. There is an inherent difficulty in declaring something like “we ARE nature” without it sounding alienating, because it is so normal for so many of us to think of nature as a separate entity. The dichotomy of nature over there is even reinforced by the idea of nature as something you go to visit to get relief from your urban/suburban dwelling.

But to give a very concrete example, if we can’t, as a culture, conceptualize something like the destruction of a mountain thousands of miles away for extractive purposes as the destruction of part of ourselves, we run the very real of continuing to self-destruct. That doesn’t have to be a left-right political issue because no traditional political contingent has a monopoly on appreciating something about nature.

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