NAOMI WHITE

EXCAVATIONS #5, "This Is A Space, Granted By Collapse," - Dionne Brand,  26.2x33”

EXCAVATIONS 

The socio-political ramifications of our species are ingrained in rocks. Like a camera, rocks record and bear witness to our collective past. In the gasses they trap, every environmental change is stored forever, cataloging the unending story of the destruction of our planet and its inhabitants by a dominant class. They hold an undeniable truth in a world of shifting disinformation.

Rocks are alive.

Excavations explores the complicated role the camera plays in our violent, troubled past and present, and the way systems of oppression perpetuate the Anthropocene. Archival images from American magazines such as Life and National Geographic reveal entrenched ideologies about race, gender, and our relationship to nature, animals, and the planet. The omnipresence of danger, and the urgency to control (the narrative, the body, the earth, the animal) found in these pages, are pervasive and loud themes.

Simultaneously, magazines such as Ebony and Ms. feature activism, strategies for survival, the importance of care, community and hope. These are themes that do not define themselves by what they are not, but by what they can and will be. As an artist working at the intersection of ecology and photography, I am critically exploring the world views that allow and perpetuate societal inequality, the acceptance of the torture and eating of animals, the prohibition of a woman’s right to her own body, and the relationship of these inequities to the climate crisis. I am also reflecting on my own privilege as an environmental activist, white artist and educator, examining where I am situated within these narratives. Making this work allows me to explore how these inequities influence one another, and opens up conversations for change.

Excited by the idea that rocks hold truths in an age of disinformation, I began tearing and burning into my photographs of landscapes, layering them over and over until new spaces emerged. These fissures and cracks make room for connections between the earth and its inhabitants, between the past and future possibilities.


EXCAVATIONS #14, "The Hour Of The Changes," - Dionne Brand, 32x22"

EXCAVATIONS #4, "Earth Dark, Sun Light, Wood Touch, Bird Song,"  - Ursula Le Guin, 19.5x25”

Landscape shot in the wide open spaces of Wyoming featuring 2 large purple and black rocks piled on top of each other. The photograph is then printed multiple times and layered on top of each other with holes torn and burned into them.


EXCAVATIONS, #21, 13x19".    

These landscape images were made in Wyoming, on the territory of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Cheyenne, and the Apsaalooké (Crow) tribes. 20% of all artwork earnings from this project go to The Center Pole, a non profit on the Crow Indian Reservation, where they build knowledge, justice, opportunity and prosperity in Native communities.

EXCAVATIONS #15, "A Tremor Of The Hand In The Realization Of Endings," 32x22"

"I build my language with rocks." 

Édouard Glissant, L'Intention poétique

EXCAVATIONS #9 , "The Problem was Gravity, and the Answer Was Gravity," 20x30

EXCAVATIONS #3, "Hope In The Dark," 48.5x35”

When I began making this work, the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of the world, was intentionally set on fire to clear land for cattle or big agriculture, one of the leading causes of global warming. In the natural world fire drives a cycle of destruction and rebirth. Indigenous peoples mirrored this rhythm, as do sustainable farmers, nurturing ecological diversity and maintaining equilibrium by harnessing fire’s remarkable power to restart natural systems. Burned pages also reminds us of hate groups burning books in attempts to erase truth about the past, and how the burning of fossil fuels is destroying all habitats and most people’s ways of life. There is a violence and unpredictability to fire, as there is to erasure. But fire can heal, and metaphorically has the power to burn down unjust frameworks. Fire can usher into existence new perspectives and approaches to modernity. Fire can provide hope in dark times.


"To go down into the earth is to travel back in time, and to excavate it is to drag the past into the present, a process mining has done on a scale so colossal it's changed the earth all the way up to the upper atmosphere. You can tell this story as a labor story, but you can also tell it as an ecological story, and the two dovetail in the end, as a story of devastation." 

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

A large purple rock in a sea of grey pebbles against green foliage in Wyoming. Naomi White photographed these landscapes on an artist residency. She then prints the images in multiple and tears and burns into them, revealing hidden stories.

EXCAVATIONS # 6, "The Small Talk Of Swallows," - Ursula LeGuin, 31x38”

EXCAVATIONS, #1 , 44x55"

A large red rock against a blue sky is torn and burned into revlealing images from national magazines. These stories both reflect on our violent, troubled past and create space for new possibilities.

EXCAVATIONS #7, "Mallet and Chisel, Pick and Gad," Ursula Le Guin, 18x24”

EXCAVATIONS #8, "Fugitive Pieces," - Anne Michaels, 18x24”

With Gratitude: I was inspired to make these photographs at the Jentel Artist Residency in Wyoming, on the territory of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Cheyenne, and the Apsaalooké (Crow) tribes. I want to thank Jentel for its support, and honor and acknowledge the original Indigenous people of Wyoming.

For every piece in this series, 20% of each sale goes to The Center Pole, a non profit on the Crow Indian Reservation, and the good work they are doing to build knowledge, justice, opportunity and prosperity in Native communities.

I am also influenced by and indebted to many great feminist, anti-racist, and queer writers, like Rebecca Solnit, Angela Davis, Sylvia Wynter, Kathryn Yusoff, Wendy Harding, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Dionne Brand, TJ Demos, and Donna Haraway. I am also grateful to my students, with whom I developed these ideas further in collaborations and conversations in the classroom.

EXCAVATIONS #11,"There May Always Be Tigers, But Sometimes There Are Strawberries," 24x32”

EXCAVATIONS #12, "The Sky Was A Portal, A Famine, A Jacket,"  -Rebecca Solnit 56"x39" 

KINSHIP

Very slowly burning, the big forest tree

stands in the slight hollow of the snow
melted around it by the mild, long
heat of its being and its will to be
root, trunk, branch, leaf, and know
earth dark, sun light, wind touch, bird song.

Rootless and restless and warmblooded, we
blaze in the flare that blinds us to that slow,
tall, fraternal fire of life as strong
now as in the seedling two centuries ago.


Ursula Le Guin

EXCAVATIONS #13, My Tongue Has Rattled In My Teeth

EXCAVATIONS #13, "My Tongue Has Rattled In My Teeth,"  - Dionne Brand,  42x29.5"

Though we may feel surrounded by exclusion and oppression, it’s important to engage with the world we want to live in, to be compelled to act with a multiplicity of voices, and to seek out joy as both resistance and healing.


EXCAVATIONS #16, Untitled, 13x19"

EXCAVATIONS #17, Untitled, 13x19"

EXCAVATIONS #18, Untitled, 13x19"

EXCAVATIONS #19, Loving Through Every Moment, 13x19"

EXCAVATIONS #20, Untitled, 13x19"

Video by Producer Denise Hamilton

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