NTHROPOCENE

9 October 2015 KETCHUP DROOL

K-HOLE Issue #5 A Report About Doubt. K-HOLE is a trend forecasting group based in New York. It was founded by Greg Fong, Sean Monahan, Chris Sherron, Emily Segal, and Dena Yago.

NTHROPOCENE, as you likely know, is the term applied increasingly by a range of scientists and others to this period in Earth and human history in which our species is influencing a host of planetary systems in big ways with long-lasting consequences.

In the strictest sense, it’s the name proposed for an emerging geological epoch measurably shaped by humans and putting an end to the Holocene, the epoch since the last ice age ended. In a looser sense, Anthropocene is an emerging name (for lack of a better one) for a time in which the global environment is increasingly what we choose to make it — for better or worse.

Dena Yago, About The Eternities Between The Many and The Few, 2014, C-print, aluminium. Courtesy the artist and High Art, Paris

Dena Yago, The Punishment Begins, 2014, C-print, aluminium. Courtesy the artist and High Art, Paris

Most known for her work as a founding member of the trend forecasting group K-Hole, poet and artist Dena Yago has over the past five years produced a cycle of meditations on the city and its destabilizing effects on communities and landscapes. Her work engages with the infertility of the urban sphere, and the paradoxical attraction it has over different species. In New York, ducks no longer migrate south for the winter, making Central Park pond their permanent home. …

K-HOLE Issue #5 A Report About Doubt.

The text in these works is not my own. It’s taken from episode titles of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1980 television miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz. In the first episode, “The Punishment Begins,” Franz Biberkopf, the protagonist, is released from prison. Throughout the series he falls under many different systems of control, whether it be love, employment, addiction, or the political forces struggling for power in 1920s Germany. I’m interested in how these relationships of control, care, domination, and submission bleed into one another, and how these are acted out in spaces that are clearly delimited as free. The imagery is taken from a series of photo shoots in dog parks around Los Angeles, depicting dogs at rest in a fenced-in (fence not depicted) space otherwise meant for exercise and recreation. While the relationship between the text and image is intended to stress non-equivalences, both point to the experience of the submissive.

Pioneer Woman with Ree Drummond
Outdoor Channel

Huntress with Heidi Wilson
Outdoor Channel

Taking the Deep South as its backdrop, the new suite of works at Artissima extends a nod to a genre of cooking show featuring a particular brand of female homesteading. Programmes involving women tasked with hunting, preparing the kill and homemaking, such as the Outdoor Channel’s Huntress starring Heidi Wilson and Pioneer Woman with Ree Drummond. These series, oscillating between the wild and the civilization, plot out a set of connections between maternal care, domesticity and violence that form the milieu for a sculptural installation and photographic series.

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