Rowan Weir

You are the first human. It is you. Remember the vast primordial soup in which you were plunged, a somersaulting liquid ascension, the instinctive reach of your hands, then- emergence. Like a single blistering bubble you surface and burst open, a creature of mud and sticks rising to meet the crude and untamed wild, still in geologic infancy and grossly unprimed for habitation. The land is raw with cavernous ruptures, abrupt fissures unzipping dunes of pink sand. Pearlescent grains shift uneasily underfoot, amorphous and unformed as you are. What drew you to this place, upon whose invitation did you come? Above, you sense a still more incomprehensible void than the one from which you made a recent exit. Somewhere great spheres hum to one another in harmonious resonance, rotating gently in a smoky, spangled vacuum.

And who am I? In this place, an imagined landscape of the burgeoning Anthropocene, I am arbiter of a new and glorious dawn. This is mine, this realm of dreamlike discovery, whose lingering imprints remain somewhere above the instinctual drives of our limbic system, forever tickling at the edge of conscious thought. Here all ideas emerge sticky and wet, like the blackened bones of a mammoth pulled from pooled tar, pitch and oil still clinging and seeping into the spongiform hollows. I make order among them, revealing the core primary elements and most basic components comprising systems of unknowable complexity. Through my work I engage with the subtle fluctuations of human perception, cognition, and memory: the mechanisms by which we process and relate to the elegant machinery of the universe. As patterns in nature repeat themselves over varying levels of magnification, symbols repeat themselves in people, spelling out our collective response to the extraordinary impulses that govern our psyche. By employing these signifiers, I convey a singular sense of overwhelming divinity and interconnected truths, inviting personal and emotional responses to the sacred inherent in the wondrously expansive natural world and its underlying structures.

And you are the last. That is also you. Shading your eyes from the searing, interminable glare, you gaze across innumerable punctures, divets in the parched and scabby surface of deserted earth. For all it’s desolation, the land lacks the huskish look of the recently emptied, displaying instead the glittering, angular remains of industry past. Above you, a radiant red eye dilates hungrily. The surrounding halo spits flaming edicts that bloom into prisms of color in the depleted atmosphere. It is a monstrous orb, bloated but unreplete, set to gorging itself on the diminishing horizon and lazily consuming the sky to entirety. Undoubtedly, it will drink you down like the oceans from which you came, hissing into the acid smoke of vaporized salt. You ready yourself, in tandem with a surging pyroclastic flow, to meander towards the vacant shoreline.