Cloud Atlas and Crater Study, 2021, 50in x 66in each, photo transfers and acrylic on canvas
3 archival tables, 24 x 48in each, photocopies, prints, book, plastic, concrete, styrofoam, bronze
Installation views, Perpetual Ebb, Rueff Galleries at Purdue University, 2022
Cloud Atlas is a 50 x 66in canvas featuring multiple photo transfers of explosions juxtaposed with images of cloud formations. The plumes of smoke that index the explosions are the results of a variety of causes such as nuclear testing, taliban attacks, allied airstrikes and volcanic eruptions - yet they are displayed in a non-hierarchical, -chronological and -linear manner, side by side, and alongside images of cumulonimbus, or thunder clouds. Following a similarly non-hierarchical arrangement, Crater Study, a second 50 x 66in canvas, features a number of depressions in the ground, respectively the results of meteorite hits, volcanic activity, or bomb, or IED explosions.
Cloud Atlas and Crater Study are accompanied by 3 archival tables featuring a variety of images, objects and ephemerae, amongst them copies of US government documents on cloud seeding used by the military in Vietnam, as well as miniature models of craters, files of which can be readily downloaded and 3D printed at home for use as terrain in wargaming by a growing number of online communities.
The 2D and 3D elements on display are part of a larger series entitled Traces, Shadows and other Peripheral Findings that employs the speculative methodology of “visual archeology”, by focusing the viewer’s attention on the in-between spaces to make sense of the world, on the traces, and fragments that are indexical to an event and often remain unrecorded.
Through mechanisms of appropriation, and recombination, Traces, Shadows and other Peripheral Findings asks us to consider the nature of truth and representation, and more specifically the ideological mechanisms at play when we are presented with images of warfare. In whose service are the images of warfare that we consume? And what happens to their legibility and meaning when we take them out of their original contexts and combine them into an archive that disregards the dominant archive’s syntax?
