Atomic Priesthood (2019)
In January 2019, I had just completed writing my first draft of my dissertation, and my mind was starting to wander away from experiencing illness. Dan Harvey and I had been daydreaming about a project on speculative psychiatry. About how a future DSM (the diagnostic manual for psychiatric disorders) would have to include ecologically induced disorders as we progressed further and further into the Anthropocene. We wrote an essay about my children growing up in a world of increasing temperature, more extreme weather events, and the loss of the natural world, and its effects on their mental health. I was thinking about the illness trauma from my childhood and the bipolar disorder I now lived with. Would this be their trauma? Would this set them down my path?
In January, I made a technological jump in my studio to a new way of rendering these videos that could get them more photorealistic and render at a fraction of the time. There was a learning curve, but within a week I was turning one of my photographs from December into a 10-minute video, a duration that, before this change in hardware and software, I could have never achieved. Instead of months of rendering, I completed it in 2 weeks. It was a completely static scene that simply had the transition from day to night, that perfectly looped, and you could live in that space. That was And All of Everything.
But Dan and my conversations kept developing and changing at a rapid pace. Storm Fear came first, a gesture to get a sense of the acceleration we were all headed towards. To be overwhelmed. Then Dan showed me a painting by Matthew Tarni of a man walking through a forest in a radiation suit from fear of the spread of ticks created by increasing temperatures. It was like a bolt of lightning hit me, and I felt a future world of people wandering and witnessing a changed world. They would become fatigued, stumble, or lose themselves in the unimaginable as the world took on supernatural qualities. They discovered monuments from a different time, capsuled moments from the early stages of the Anthropocene. I read Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects, and he described a priesthood, the Atomic Priesthood, that would care for atomic waste across the unimaginable time of its half-life. I saw these figures as a priesthood. To witness it. This work is still only a sketch, and I hope to motion-capture dancers and have them inhabit this world and turn it into a film.
In April 2019, two weeks before the Dyscorpia exhibition we would premiere this new work in, I had a vision. I had been watching And All of Everything on loop every night for months. It was slow and the still night was demanding, but I was attuning myself to time in a way I hadn't experienced yet. It was also the beginning of my meditation practice, and they both wrapped on each other, like a snake devouring its tail. I love physics, especially cosmology. I took classes at university on this, and I study it every night to this day. It grounds my unbelievable sensations about reality into all the strangeness of quantum mechanics and the beginning of the universe. Along with my changing temporal scale, my spacial scale was changing to take in the cosmos. I could feel the scale and similarity of it all—from the plank length, to the atom, to the cell, to the body, to the forest, to the biosphere, to the solar system, to the galaxy, to the supercluster of galaxies we are apart of, to the observable universe, to the multiverse. I had a vision of the birth of the cosmos, a living planet waiting, a sun radiating outside of vision, and a disc plane for a being to stand on and witness it all, across cosmic time. In Nothing Lasts, I had to wait for the sun to come, enjoy its glow, and as the universe progresses, it loses its furnace and lets the cosmos go dark. This was the transitionary piece into my current work. I was sensing something in that work, a challenge with time that I wanted to explore.