NATURE TO THE DOGS.
A fictional thesis exploring contrasting densities: ground, air, earth, foam.
The ecopoetics of solid and gas.
This artist book was produced together with the NATURE TO THE DOGS exhibition at Alfred University. Through visual poetry as well as poetic, narrative, and academic writing, this book explores the theoretical matrices of the show. These matrices grew out of the sculptures like so many Lichtenberg figures: the more I thought about them, the more uncontrollable they became.
NATURE TO THE DOGS is, in many ways, a story about models of the Earth. It is a story about density: the mutating solid of the planet, the ethereal vapor of the sky. In place of authority, linearity, and resolution, this book offers an open web of associations. Just as ecological thought is inherently prismatic, branching, and tentacular, so too is NATURE TO THE DOGS.
The NATURE TO THE DOGS artist book was submitted to the Scholes Library MFA Collection in lieu of the standard blue booklet. You can access a free, low-resolution PDF of this book here. If you would like a hard copy of this book, sold at cost, please contact me directly. Scroll down this page for some notes on excerpted pages from the book.
NATURE TO THE DOGS is part of the Neo-Mineralia Library collection.
"Seeing yourself from another point of view is the beginning of ethics and politics.” Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought.
Mark Dion's 'Scala Naturae' (right) and Casey Burton's 'Bed' (left). In the first, a Great Chain of Being, in the second, a Great Entanglement.
Images of mesh.
Cosmological models. On the left, Earth as static, self-contained bubble: in the words of Peter Sloterdijk, "an immunological sphere," or a "smooth, universal orb." On the right, Earth as "turbulent compost": a lava tube eating and excreting itself into being.
Much like rock or ceramic, the words on the page begin to densify. Language compresses beyond legibility, becomes image and sedimentary layer. This poem is a thematic precursor to 'She who vomited our her own metals' (forthcoming, 2024).