This work has been exhibited as part of larger installations, and also screened as part of a 2024 curated video series at Western Michigan University and Alfred State University.
Futility is at the heart of ecological crisis. This work started with a curiosity about the coarse alienation we have come to recognize when confronted with the industrial scaffolding for contemporary life: the near-daily reminder of the gap between our individual actions and massive, unchecked ecological impacts, pollution, and toxicity. It is a gnawing ambiguity born of trying to reconcile the difference between what we can do and what we can’t. From trying to bear witness to the impossible distance looming between bodies in the Anthropocene, and the materials that scale up our impact on the planet. These materials include asphalt, concrete, toxins, and other waste, which accumulate in the earth's crust to become future strata. They layer into the earth, which has to digest our inputs into deep time.
In the video, the artist attempts to scale giant heaps of gravel used to produce asphalt at a facility in Troy, NY, but struggles to make headway. She then attempts to eat clay rocks (an impulse with a long lineage in human societies, but pathologized in Western society as an eating disorder known as "pica.") Perhaps in eating rocks, the protagonist might learn to process landscapes with her body, as such landscapes have been digesting humanity's own inputs. She senses the vulnerability of having to metabolize back the pollutants and toxic materials we have put into the earth. Taste and digestion may become a form of sensing which goes beyond simply “consuming,” and thus, is an alternative to extraction and degradation. In the words of scholar Iemanjá Brown, appetite is an “aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human.”