::: DAWN of the ANTHROPOCENE::: 6th Flr Gallery presented by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Melbourne Australia, August, 2011 :::
“Among scientists, there is now serious talk that the Holocene has ended and a new era has begun, called the Anthropocene. Human activity has left a “stratigraphic signal” which will be detectable thousands of years from now in ice cores and sedimentary rocks. The Anthropocene begins with the Industrial Revolution, around 1800, when we began to exert our most profound impact on the world, especially by altering the carbon content of the atmosphere. (Some scientists believe it may have begun with the beginning of farming 12-8,000 years ago). Humans are the only species to have defined a geological period by its activity — something usually performed by major glaciations, mass extinction and the colossal impact of objects from outer space. But the true meaning of the Anthropocene is that we have affected nearly every aspect of our environment — from a warming atmosphere to the bottom of an acidifying ocean.”
New York Times, Feb 11th 2011
“The Wild Man Of The Woods is the ordinary man driven mad by civilisation, and taking refuge in an animalistic existence in the woods. “The wild man of the woods, the ‘woodwose’, was often an outlaw who had taken to the woods and then developed sub-human habits and the fierce unpredictable behaviour of a wild beast. The green man was a personification of spring, a mythological supernatural being, half human and half plant” (unknown source)
These works were produced in Indonesia and Australia and continue an ongoing investigation into aspects of ecology in a humanist (or post/pre-humanist) context. The figures in each work are derived from medieval woodcuts, the tarot, 16th century engravings and depict emblematic European male characters or archetypes suspended in space, variously in a states of grace, connection, fear or transcendance of the terrestrial, botanical, natural world. The source of most of these images is unknown. They come from the beginning of or just before the age of science, industrialisation, exploration, reason and enlightenment, an era still steeped in superstition, when the secrets of nature remained largely in the domain of the mystical. A time which contained the seeds of the current era of ecological armageddon (the Anthropocene).
The works are ruminations on the limitations and failure of science and reason in the context of politics and enviromentalism and the re-emergence of a medieval pre enlightenment consciousness. In there as well are references to the synthesis of mysticysm and ecology, the woodwose or Green man, mandrake, the primacy of carbon in material and energy exchange, botanophobia, the martyrdom of species, street art from Jogjakarta, and the world view of 17th century Jesuit scientist/ mystic Anasthasius Kircher.
