Toxicity is Agency
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The central visual argument in this work concerns non-living, nonhuman matter. Historically, ‘base matter’ has been regarded as inert and passive; raw material to be activated and manipulated by human beings. Fossil fuels, metals, minerals, and countless chemical compounds populate a list of geologically-derived substances that we routinely treat as mere tools and substrates (including some of the extremely toxic pigments used in painting itself). Yet the passivity we take for granted is now in question: the multiplying anomalous emergences of Climate Change into the biosphere makes palpable for humans an alien world of dynamic, generative, and aggressively contagious materiality.
One figure through which to think this troubling, dark vibrancy at the heart of planetary geology is the toxic chemical. As a specific example of nonliving, active matter, the toxic chemical exhibits disrespect for boundaries, extreme reactivity, and stands in relation to humans as the unintended bi-product or undetected intruder, making it a generative starting point for investigation. I explicitly render an image of matter (toxic, geologic, and inorganic) as being fundamentally weird, revealing an inhuman planetary sphere that is resistant to full human conceptualization and instrumentalization. At stake here is not only the critical question of how humans conceive of nonhuman agency, but whether we continue the kinds of thinking which condition our current, unsustainable participation on Earth. How do humans relate to these larger, stranger material systems of which we are inextricably a part? This figure of toxic matter connects to issues such as ecological catastrophe, Global Capitalism, machine imaging technologies, the breakdown of the supposed Nature/Culture divide, the materiality of painting, and the intimacy of humans with an inexhaustible field of nonhuman agents.
The emergence of Big Data, planet-scale mathematical simulation, and satellite imaging technologies has pushed me to adopt a formal language which can depict a collective contemporary condition of complexity and entanglement. Collage, with its aesthetics of radical disjunction and juxtaposition, can reflect our endlessly-resolving picture of “Nature.” In prior bodies of work, I pursued collage as a literal material approach, building “bodies of knowledge” compiled of fragments cut from the same science textbooks I studied with as an undergraduate. While I’ve since moved to investigate painting and drawing more deeply as practices, my approach is still collage-like in that it begins with an improvisational layering of different images in paint. My library of research references includes geological and mineral photography, goofball material demonstration videos on Youtube, and personal observations of matter’s weird behavior out in the world. I also look at 3D topographical renderings and 3D data visualizations as promising new references for their conceptual linkages.
Throughout, my interest in the toxic chemical compound, via its mobile and disruptive materiality, ties together my interests in the geo- and bio-sciences, new materialism, Climate Change, Twentieth Century art movements like Cubism, and the engagement of contemporary painting with digital technologies. The turn to science by a growing number of artists represents something of a shift in the orientation of art. The artist Taney Roniger, in a recent essay, describes this shift as “[a] move out into the world, …[a] re-engagement with the real.” For me, this real is the nonhuman. The reality of nonhuman agents, and their constitutive relationship with human beings, is the primary idea motivating my work. We are at the very beginning of re-formulating our understanding of the world and our understanding of our relationship to it. In the shadow of such looming intellectual, technological, and ecological changes, painting as a practice can make use of familiar artistic approaches, whose histories allow them a degree of visual and intellectual accessibility. Confronted with scientific data visualizations, ArcGIS maps, and statistical projections--visual forms that are potentially opaque without specialized training--painting can take on the cultural project of processing and interpreting these rapid mutations of human knowledge.
One figure through which to think this troubling, dark vibrancy at the heart of planetary geology is the toxic chemical. As a specific example of nonliving, active matter, the toxic chemical exhibits disrespect for boundaries, extreme reactivity, and stands in relation to humans as the unintended bi-product or undetected intruder, making it a generative starting point for investigation. I explicitly render an image of matter (toxic, geologic, and inorganic) as being fundamentally weird, revealing an inhuman planetary sphere that is resistant to full human conceptualization and instrumentalization. At stake here is not only the critical question of how humans conceive of nonhuman agency, but whether we continue the kinds of thinking which condition our current, unsustainable participation on Earth. How do humans relate to these larger, stranger material systems of which we are inextricably a part? This figure of toxic matter connects to issues such as ecological catastrophe, Global Capitalism, machine imaging technologies, the breakdown of the supposed Nature/Culture divide, the materiality of painting, and the intimacy of humans with an inexhaustible field of nonhuman agents.
The emergence of Big Data, planet-scale mathematical simulation, and satellite imaging technologies has pushed me to adopt a formal language which can depict a collective contemporary condition of complexity and entanglement. Collage, with its aesthetics of radical disjunction and juxtaposition, can reflect our endlessly-resolving picture of “Nature.” In prior bodies of work, I pursued collage as a literal material approach, building “bodies of knowledge” compiled of fragments cut from the same science textbooks I studied with as an undergraduate. While I’ve since moved to investigate painting and drawing more deeply as practices, my approach is still collage-like in that it begins with an improvisational layering of different images in paint. My library of research references includes geological and mineral photography, goofball material demonstration videos on Youtube, and personal observations of matter’s weird behavior out in the world. I also look at 3D topographical renderings and 3D data visualizations as promising new references for their conceptual linkages.
Throughout, my interest in the toxic chemical compound, via its mobile and disruptive materiality, ties together my interests in the geo- and bio-sciences, new materialism, Climate Change, Twentieth Century art movements like Cubism, and the engagement of contemporary painting with digital technologies. The turn to science by a growing number of artists represents something of a shift in the orientation of art. The artist Taney Roniger, in a recent essay, describes this shift as “[a] move out into the world, …[a] re-engagement with the real.” For me, this real is the nonhuman. The reality of nonhuman agents, and their constitutive relationship with human beings, is the primary idea motivating my work. We are at the very beginning of re-formulating our understanding of the world and our understanding of our relationship to it. In the shadow of such looming intellectual, technological, and ecological changes, painting as a practice can make use of familiar artistic approaches, whose histories allow them a degree of visual and intellectual accessibility. Confronted with scientific data visualizations, ArcGIS maps, and statistical projections--visual forms that are potentially opaque without specialized training--painting can take on the cultural project of processing and interpreting these rapid mutations of human knowledge.
