Title:
The Past is Now, The Present Has Yet to Arrive
Year:
2010
Media:
Unbleached cotton, embroidery floss, MDF, cardboard, pine, acrylic paint
Dimensions:
36” x 60” x 30”
Description:
A self generating time machine of sorts. Every moment is measured by the needle’s rupture. NOW is embroidered endlessly, the PRESENT is revealed via negation, stretching infinitely into the future. This piece is a meditation on the prospective thinking that we move forward with in our attempts to reconcile the cataract of our current desires with their ultimate sustainability as needs change over time. The piece forces us to question how narrowly our conception of what is to come is shaped by our present experience and past knowledge and expectations. What does it mean to be caught within the fragmented moment of a contemporary condition and a future which may render it obsolete? The piece, whose form suggests a funerary shroud, explores the way we project speculative futures from the limited position of our current understanding.
We live in the Anthropocene, named by Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000, a geological epoch distinguished by the permanent trace that humans have left across the entirety of the earth’s surface. Prior geological epochs extend in degrees of millions of years, however the Holocene, the age preceding ours, is measured as only lasting the geological blink of 11,500 years.
I have been connecting my work on the losses experienced by refugees and migrants to ecological and climate collapse, memory, tradition, borders, and belonging. These subjects are all intertwined, and it is only through dealing with our political and ecological issues systemically can we hope to find solutions to these exponentially increasing problems.