MOVE 01: Horizon

MOVE 01 inevitably recalls a canonical image in art history: Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. A human figure stands before the immensity of sky and earth, acutely aware of his own insignificance. Yet in Friedrich’s painting, the wanderer, solitary and small as he may be, still occupies a substantial portion of the frame. He stands elevated, looking directly ahead, his footing firm, poised to confront the long, fog-bound path that lies before him.

MOVE 01 is deeply unsettling. The beautiful spectacle of sky and clouds reimagines the sensibility of Romanticism within the context of environmental degradation in the Anthropocene. In the wide shot, the human figures are reduced to slender silhouettes against an immense, turbulent sky. They appear neither to be contemplating the landscape of the lake nor to be seeking or returning the gaze of anyone before them. The horizon remains perfectly straight, extending into an immeasurable distance.

Silver glimmers beneath their feet. The impermeable membrane used at the waste-treatment facility covers the “secret mountains” that reflect upon consumerism. These “silver-capped mountains” conceal the unimaginable scale of a systemic behavior whose consequence is waste. Human beings, the agents of that consequence, stand and move upon them, rendered almost insignificant. The workers who process the waste appear as tiny, negligible figures.

The devastating force of human activity in the Anthropocene is at once heimlich domestic, familiar, home and unheimlich, uncanny, alien, unhomely. The anguish of the environmental crisis slowly reveals itself through the scrutiny of the gaze. The reality of waste, and the scale and weight of consumption, disposal, and production things kept out of sight, things that cannot readily be seen gradually emerge as what has long been repressed.

The work interrogates intentionality within the act of framing, within the gaze, and within the artist’s control over equipment and labor. Does the artist romanticize the problem beneath the impermeable membrane, beneath the beautiful sky? Or might these aesthetic surfaces instead have the capacity to slow us down or compel us to confront the reality of waste and environmental degradation in the Anthropocene, even when they are wrapped in familiar and seductive forms of beauty?

Heimlich, an adjective, refers to what belongs to the home: familiar, intimate, domesticated, comfortable, sheltered, warm, and at ease.

Heimlich, domestic, familiar, intimate and unheimlich strange, frightening, alien, unhomely appear to be opposites. Yet in Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny, the distinction between the two begins to collapse: the unheimlich emerges as a particular form of the heimlich itself.

In The Uncanny, Freud deconstructs the structures of fear found in the fantastic tales once told to children and in works of speculative literature. He proposes that the structure of fear often arises from the return of the repressed: something simultaneously familiar and strange, recognizable yet difficult to explain.