Today in the news more black and brown bodies traumatized the soil is toxic the air is poison is both title and starting point for this billboard collage project made specifically in response to The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea’s appropriation of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force. The work uses the scale as the underlying structure of its overall narrative, proposing that we are currently at the peak of the scale—stuck at 12: Hurricane—and asserting that we must find strategies to move ourselves back toward 0: Calm as a necessity for any possible future. Rooted within the understanding that we are at a critical impasse where multiple imbalances within our society—climate change, global capitalism, infrastructural governance, environmental racism—are inherently entwined, Today in the news more black and brown bodies traumatized the soil is toxic the air is poison proposes that the potential ways forward are limited: we either continue on as we are, forever caught within the hurricane, or follow a new, alternate path that will help us escape a never-ending loop. The 13 billboard collages punctuate the perimeter of the entire exhibition area and begin to mark out the path.
