SWAMPSTILLS

“He appears in a robe covered with stars, with an uprooted tree over his shoulder...and with his dog beside him: a savage hunter and dark god.”
- Chiron by Károly Kerényi, in The Gods of the Greeks

Dogs and Gods.

Both circle mythically inside the Deep South morass of SWAMPSTILLS, a conceptual swamp delivered in snapshots by artist and writer, Alisha Piercy. Playing with the irony of a swamp in its apparent stillness, or a swamp captured in a still photograph, this re-creation swamp, seen as if through a peephole, features totemic-like objects poised on a platform. This carry-over raft from Piercy’s ongoing investigation into the nature of human water-dwelling and escape, is no longer a horizontal flotsam. Here, at CLARK, we are grounded inland after the journeys at sea of previous works, You have hair like flags (2010) and Bunny and Shark (2014), to be immersed—eerily, vertically—inside one of the most fertile and mysterious organisms on Earth.

Papier mâché track hounds and a black Afghan dog; a large-scale ultraviolet drawing of Taxodium Distichum, a red needle tree native to the swamp parts in the American South; cascades of live melting crystals as hurricane trigger symbols of a faraway ice cap melting; flooding and disaster grade sandbags, tie dye swaths, clay swamp waves—the first churnings of natural disaster—with a sound piece by Copenhagen artist Mikael Tobias (Swampsong, 2018) and an adjacent reading station where viewers can recline among several copies of Piercy’s chapbook, Hush, this story doesn’t belong to you (silkscreen cover, limited edition of 50, 2018)— sit suggestively conjuring a possible backstory.

Swamps, we are subliminally reminded, are complex transition areas, neither totally land nor totally water. Underworldly bacteria proliferate and scheme inside them, forming slime, primordial ooze that nourishes, frightens, destroys and offers possibilities of the sublime. Things transform in their muddy bottoms. Gods and reptiles appear and disappear, it seems, in feverish intervals. Time too, sinks under this spell. We are in the Antebellum era, the pre-hurricane of 2005, pre-history and infinity, all at once. Hush, fills us in about the dogs; how they moved into this demi-monde as avengers of, and sometimes allies to, human slaves who fled from plantations to swamps for freedom. We imagine the dogs as in-between creatures—dark ferrymen, fairy companions—at one with the amphibious agenda. In the unstill stillness of this ecosystem, Things speak silently to things¹, and the water that we feel but can’t see, fulfills its own prophecy.

1. Quote from Hush, this story doesn’t belong to you

— Caia Hagel