2017-2018: While They’re Still Here
Painting the glaciers of “While They’re Still Here,” based on photographs I took as a teenager hiking in the Cascades, I acknowledge their limited lifespans. Surreal colors denote that as these environments disappear from this earth, they will all too soon appear otherworldly.
2017-2018: Timeline
In the virtual world, our experience of time is constantly in flux, as we experience both past and present events simultaneously. Scrolling through my “current” Facebook feed I “react” and “judge” content, clicking “like,” or “wow.” A transient experience, yet the paradox being the permanence of my decision. Facebook documents the physical and measurable time I now spend on the internet. Seemingly eternally, our Facebook profiles, and all of their content, live on. After we die, a banner switches on, revealing the words “remembering,” above our name.
Alive, and in the present, I utilize Facebook as a tool to “remember.” “Timeline” consists of portraits I painted referencing photographs that popped up in my facebook notifications, announcing themselves as “a memory.” As I’d once have thumbed through the physical pages of a scrapbook, I now scroll through the images of an old facebook album.
Yet when I choose to exist virtually, where time is elastic, I feel more removed and disconnected from my physical environment, where, unlike the internet, time passes predictably – one thing leads to another. There is a beginning and an end.
As we transfer more of our lives and personhoods online, we effectively remove them from their physical surroundings. This transference into the online realm coincides with drastic changes in the environment that physically surrounds us. We are living in an era of rapid, human-generated climate change, and the fastest mass extinction ever; yet, we are disconnected from it, choosing to spend more time in virtual environments.
What better way than to seek refuge from the overwhelm of our society and planet’s decay in real time — the poverty of late capitalism, the havoc we’re wreaking on the natural environment leading to climate change, etc — than in in virtual spaces — when we scroll online, there’s no end in sight.
