With A Grain of Salt
Unique salt photograms
Katrina Jennifer Bedford
About the project:
Ontario uses enormous amounts of salt to maintain the safety of roadways and walkways during the long winter. Far too much of this salt ends up unnecessarily in Ontario’s lakes, rivers and groundwater, where it does great and lasting harm. We live in a world made by science. But we–the millions of laymen–do not understand or appreciate the knowledge which thus controls daily life. These images are unlike computer generated imagery and obtain wide popular support for slowing the effects of humans on our planet, to that end that we may explore this vast subject even further and bring as yet unexplored areas under control, there needs to be a friendly interpreter between science and the layman. The epoch of the Anthropocene needs its voice. It needs the vivification of the visual image, the warm human quality of imagination added to its austere and stern disciplines of science, politics and capitalism.
Thing theory for Brown is “a condition for thought,” enabling “new thoughts about how inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they move them, how they threaten them, how they facilitate or threaten their relation to other subjects” (7). Things also herald new ways of thinking about subject-object relations. “The story of objects asserting themselves as things,” Brown argues, “is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation” (4). This is how Thing Theory can help researchers and artists explore the urgency of the Anthropocene. This is a main theoretical impulse for this series of prints.
This project is experimental and each resulting monochromatic print is unique much like a fingerprint or a snowflake. My intention for this project is to create images that communicate to the viewer in terms they may not understand. This unknowing of the “thing” can incite imagination by pressing important issues of our time. By collecting road salt used in every-day pollution and creating imagery by changing its visual form I am endowing this common material and morphing its representation into strange and unfamiliar imagery. The resulting images are poetic and could hold vast implications for visualizing the challenges of today. By working through my idea in a variety of modes, ranging from location mapping, sample collection, experimentation and environmental activism and theory, I intend to express the hope that art can point the way to a more ecologically sustainable future. The resulting imagery suggests that with a more proactive approach to environmental concerns, the posthuman era need not signal the end of human life as we know it. Instead, the Anthropocene might provide a new beginning for all the partners in the health of the planet.
