The Once and Future Earth

Open Pit Mines

A record of the past and future Earth from those who were here

These images of open pit mines throughout the American West, continue my investigation of industrial impacts on the natural environment.

I’m attempting to create beauty and art out of destruction, denigration, and desecration of the Earth. Why beauty from destruction? One, I want to draw you in not turn you away. I want you to take a closer look, to see, and question what it is you are seeing. This engagement allows you to participate also in the making, and also make you complicit in the making of the image before you.

And we are all complicit in the images before us. Like it or not, whether aware of it or not, we contribute daily to the destruction of the Earth. Our society, conveniences, technology are built on industries that ruin the environment.

I’m not trying to make us feel bad about things, only to point out our entangled relationship with Earth—our appetites are destroying it.

My own art making is a form of appetite, a violence, as well. My photographs are made from materials mined from these open pits. I dug these holes. We all did.

There is no easy solution to the environmental predicament we find ourselves in. This series—The Once and Future Earth—asks us to imagine not just our involvement in changing the either but how we might form a different relationship with nature. I think we need to begin with a different relationship with ourselves and our appetites.

Also, we might understand the Earth as Divine, as our source, our physical and spiritual home. Honore Earth again as providing for us, and that we must provide for it, as well. We can’t continue to take. This is not how any healthy relationship works.

This series of images discovers the sublime within the desecrated landscapes of pit mines to illustrate how humans are the center of both destruction and creation.

In our search for profit, survival, meaning, we torture, pollute, and irrevocably alter the environment. We also commit violence in romanticizing nature and our relationship to it: the land becomes something other, changed again by our appetites.

 

As much as this work is a record of our rapaciousness, there is beauty. I always return to beauty in my landscape images. I do find there is beauty in what our living on Earth does to the Earth. Our scarring scars us. Our wearing, wears us.

What we are becoming as humans, is being acted out upon the face of the Earth. Our alienation, our machinization, our artificial intelligence shows up on in what we create, ironically, by destroying the environment.

The Once and Future Earth finds in these landscapes of pit mines, ancient maps of human settlement, and migrations, futuristic beings, burial chambers, exhumations of human remains, relics and icons of dead religions. It sees in the ruins attempts at survival. It sees the future history of turned into machine alongside humanity merging with machine, enhancing ourselves artificially until we are a new species—part human, part machine. It looks at our enslavement by our own irrecoverable progress, it sees us harnessed to the machines we create.