Nina Hartmann / Laura Benson

Tomona Matsukawa - Tonight, was I really with someone?, 2025 - Oil on canvas

Liz Toohey-Wiese, 2024.

"A sign installed in the largest wildfire burn I’ve ever seen, along the BC/YK border. Borrowing the aesthetics of BC Recreation Site signs, once again pointing to the overlaps of outdoor recreation, resource extraction, and the consequences of the climate crisis. Most recreation sites in BC exist along previously built logging and mining roads.

“Forced into a great and difficult transformation” was a line I heard in a lecture on Buddhist philosophy I was listening to on my drive up north. But it became another mantra I thought about while living in a place that’s been utterly transformed by resource extraction over the past century, and as I thought about the burnt landscapes I drove through."

More here.

march 13, 2007

“Polar explorers - one gathers from their accounts - sought at the Poles something of the sublime. Simplicity and purity attracted them; they set out to perform clear tasks in uncontaminated lands. The land’s austerity held them. They praised the land’s spare beauty as if it were a moral or a spiritual quality: “icy halls of cold sublimity,” “lofty peaks perfectly covered with eternal snow.” Fridtjof Nansen referred to “the great adventure of the ice, deep and pure as infinity… the eternal round of the universe and its eternal death.” Everywhere polar prose evokes these absolutes, these ideas of “eternity” and “perfection,” as if they were some perfectly visible part of the landscape. They went, I say, partly in search of the sublime, and they found it the only way it can be found, here or there - around the edges, tucked into the corners of the days. For they were people - all of them, even the British - and despite the purity of their conceptions, they man-hauled their humanity to the Poles.”

—

Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole,” from Teaching a Stone to Talk

Priests and monks blessing server rooms and sprinkling holy water on computer systems as a way to prevent them from ever shutting down

More at source

WILDWOOD, NJ | 2021

Nam June Paik: TV Bed 電視床 (1972-1991)