Wonzimer Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022

 Present Topography

Indexical Santa Cruz, 2021

photos by Suzy Poling

“The geontological division of Life and Nonlife is not merely a division but an opportunity for a set of further divisions as maneuver... Capitalism depends on creating by destroying and then erasing the connections between the material wastes it leaves behind and the glimmering oasis of privilege this waste affords. [Anti-colonial worlds need] a constant attentiveness to the adjustments and innovations necessary to keep human and nonhuman forms in a co-constituting relation was a creative core to the ancestral present.“- Elizabeth Povinelli

There is an urgency in our time, to begin to reconstruct new narratives of connection to our acentered planet and our entangled present. Neither a nostalgic past of a pristine habitat that once was, nor a utopian, techno-fixed future of what could be, but instead, a present as continual processes of re-relating to landscape and nonhuman life. We must destabilize congealed perspectives which still normalize nature as something “out there”, or as a “sublime retreat”, so as to realize there is no “out there”. Wherever we are, we are affecting and being affected by the planetary, that which is both of us and beyond us, but is never reducible to one or the other. Present Topography explores how we might reorient within the present, while doing so in a state of attentive presence. Living in the age of an attention economy, where our presence is constantly capitalized on in a way which hinders our senses of receptivity, presence is of urgency to be able to deeply listen and respond to effects on our internal and external environment. Considering landscape not as something “out there”, but as something that can move and dance, at all times and places, within our inner experience, where new habits can assist us to resituate exteriority into our immediate, inner psyche. The installation exhibits painted ritual objects and sacred shapes entangled with landscapes that are never wholly contained by their physical locations, illustrating how preexisting knowledge can be deployed to re-enchant our relationship to the “nonliving” world within our daily practices. Ritual practice always involves a mutability which erodes bodily edges, extending the sensorium in a way which defies “geontopower”, the governance of existence through the imposition of divisions between life and nonlife, which lies at the heart of anthropocentric colonial ordering. Present Topography redeploys space and time as a suture of this rupture, grounded in enduring presence.