Katherine Earle

Rust

Progress has become a destructive myth that is pathologically advancing on the false premises of its merits, eliminating everything in its path. We are meeting a present and a future that is rife with suffering and terrifying climate and military events. Meanwhile, indigenous nations with knowledge that extends beyond what modern civilization can lay claim to, are struggling to defend the biodiversity that keeps us alive against the aggressive onslaught of “progress”. This series references to an almost obsolete language of universality, buried, abandoned, erased and replaced by erroneous hierarchies of value that have been stamped into our consciousness. However, these paradigms are falling away to reveal wisdom that is stronger and runs deeper than the harmful mythology of progress over all else. The prints in this series are direct transfers from metal found in abandoned trainyard in Montreal, which by their very nature as industrial material reference the Industrial Revolution, a time when progress became the name of the game in the US.

What future are we careening towards with blind faith in this pursuit of this thing we call progress? The imprints of the rust fortify and destroy this fabric, created through the labor of silkworms and the people and machines that wove it into being. The metallic trace references remnants of that which we have been told is of the past, not the present nor the future. There is no separation between old and new, yet we are told that what is ancient can be forgotten, and our future is what we should focus on. What if the most advanced civilization is actually in our past, and this future focus only serves to mollify us so that we do not question the sources of brilliance that history cannot hide? What if the most advanced technology that ever existed was in your grandmother’s memory for preparing a meal, in the seed your uncle planted, or pulsating from your parent’s heart as they held you? What can we learn about survival and thriving from the mycorrhizal fungi in the roots of the tree, the moss and lichen on the forest floor, the wind through prairie grasses, the coral or the many other species in the seas, the stars that we see in a dark night sky, the quantum world and other ongoing mysteries?