The fascination with dirt, mud and earth runs deep and taps into a longstanding, mythical and magnetic psychology. Dirt is not necessarily clean or unclean, vital or morbid. It has a certain agency that resists reason, and it can also…
Category: Dirt
AMOEBA + PSEUDO-AMOEBA
Astarte Rowe Introduction: Art is Amoebic This essay was largely written in concert with an exhibition I curated at the Critical Distance gallery in Toronto, Ontario, titled The Amoebic Workshop: A Submerged Exhibition, which opened on 21 September 2016.[1] Along…
Uninhabiting the Corrosive Littoral of the Anthropocene in the Levelled Sands of Being
Justin Clemens ‘The poetry of earth is never dead’ — John Keats Like many other people, I believe we are living in the end times — at least for the earth as a habitable place for humans and, indeed, for so…
Microontologies of Art, Design, and Architecture
by Myra J. Hird When Martyn Tranter, a biogeochemist at the University of Bristol, forgot his glacier goggles whilst conducting research in Greenland, he discovered something breathtaking. Without his color-filtering eyewear, Tranter encountered a kaleidoscope of mauve, green, red, and…
Dirt is Not Soil
Joshua West Smith I live in a strange part of the country that provides countless example of how the planet manufactures dirt with water and wind, how it exists as a thing in our language that is easily dismissed. But…
Dirty Feet
Richard Speer Feet are a good place for dirt. In the rural American South where I spent my first six years, the signs on store doors warning “No shoes, no shirt, no service” weren’t for show. They were there to…
Minus Us
Reflections by Taryn Tomasello Minus Us was the third part of an ongoing exhibition series called Object Permanence Project* exploring physical presence, and disappearance curated and organized by the artist Taryn Tomasello. Minus Us was set in an excavated lot…
An Interview with Gabriel Lalonde
Gabriel Lalonde: Who am I? I am first of all earthen, attached to my human status. Telluric, rooted in the Earth. I: artist-poet, poet-artist. Artist and poet, I paint and write. I write words and images. Art inhabits me and…
An Interview with Sarah Witt
Jodie Cavalier All images by and courtesy Sarah Witt. I first learned of Sarah Witt through the High Desert Test Sites newsletter. I had been accepted to the AZ West Wagon Encampment Residency to continue my research on food, storytelling,…
Aurous and Geometric Interventions: An Interview with Claudia Wieser
Astarte Rowe The Mirror (installation view), 2013, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. An early apprenticeship as blacksmith at Bergmeister Kunstshmiede led Claudia Wieser to the prestigious Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, where she completed an MA in Painting. Geometry…