Decomposure
Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis
Decomposure documents the interrelated processes of growth and decay. The photographs and canvases in the series record the strange and beautiful patterns that manifest in the natural process of decomposition. Contextualized by forested settings and embellished with added color, these uneasy compositions speak to perceived aesthetic and biological value.
Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis are a married artist team whose multidisciplinary individual and collective work spans photography, installation, assemblage and book arts. Their five major projects have focused on themes of interdependence, environmental crisis and resilience, the Anthropocene epoch, and geologic time. Their work often employs alternative photographic techniques to foreground physical, tactile experience and the ideas of presence and immediacy.
Delete Background
Jon Gottshall
These images are a consideration of how we assign value in our landscape, in this specific case, in the Columbia Slough.
Value, in this case, is defined as what is accounted for in financial terms, “improvements” that add utility to property. Undeveloped, the land itself often has little value. As a host environment, its value is minimized, especially in the case of wetlands. The services wetlands offer, in the form of flood control, water purification and prolific habitat, rarely makes it to the spreadsheets.
In these images, the slough and the land surrounding it is background to the buildings and infrastructure that holds a calculated value.
The Columbia Slough is just one example the narrative that nature and the economy are separate domains. Globally, we are experiencing the consequences of that narrative.
