Waiting for the Flood
2021Centering on quotes from Theodor Adorno’s brief essay Mammoth, from his Minima Moralia, this exhibition explores what it means to be “waiting for the flood”. . . anticipating and expecting the next climate-disaster, while trying to make meaning of that knowledge. Adorno suggests that familiarizing ourselves with the gigantic, perhaps the monstrous, is one way to prepare for the outsized horrors to come. And that our obsession with the persistence of extinct animals offers hope that something will outlive our mistakes. With this as a starting point, the comic-style drawings in this exhibition imagine extinct animals among us, perhaps as corporeal monsters, perhaps merely as ghosts. . . haunting the sites of their absence. Through the Biblical figure of Noah, the drawings engage with the widespread use of religious terminology in discussions about de-extinction (building upon previous work in Point of No Return). The drawing’s collage approach sources imagery from vintage horror comics, girl-scout calendars, movie stills, and infomercials for Armageddon prepper supplies to think about the cultural work that ideas about extinction and de-extinction are doing in our own preparation for the future.
Drawings (colored pencil and xerox), inkjet prints, plastic and ceramic animals, miniature human figures, cans of vegetarian "meats", metal shelf, paper doilies, and buckets
Installation of "Waiting for the Flood" at Carnation Contemporary in Portland, OR