Our melting, shifting, liquid world won’t wait / for manifesto or mandate, each / warning a reckoning. --Maura Dooley
Evoking an eerie sense of foreboding, Reckoning witnesses the disintegrating beauty of the natural world and own culpability in its demise. This is the profound dilemma of modern existence: our planet’s health, and our own, suffers as a direct result of what we typically deem human progress.
2017 saw some of the worst wildfires, droughts, and climate change-related devastation on record. We live in the Anthropocene—the name for the current geological epoch in which human beings determine the continuing livability of earth. Our impact to date has been so profound that much of the damage is irreversible.
Many of us remain alienated from the natural world, prioritizing our own needs above and before those of our planet. But we are inextricably connected: Reckoning tells a powerful story of this (inter)connectivity, about the ubiquity and urgency of environmental crises and my responses to them.
I am repeatedly drawn to photograph scenes that function, often ambiguously, as visual markers of my own frustrations. The images record and imagine my anxieties and fears, engaging viewers in emblematic and intriguing dialogue about human complacency. Reckoning is balanced in tone: critical, but not bleak; curious, but not preachy. This project is both elegiac—mourning what we’ve lost—but also energetic. To re-imagine our relationship to our environment is to challenge it. The call to action is to change it.