Hideouts, Escape Hatches and a Submarine

Hideouts, Escape Hatches and a Submarine
March, 2022
Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland

Death in life, human/nature, entanglements, facts and frictions are the stream of consciousness that produced this work. In the last weeks of my father’s life he hovered in between states of sharply conscious and revelatory subconscious. How many hideouts do you have? Where are the escape hatches? One afternoon he drifted up out of sleep on a submarine.

These paintings and drawings are portals or escape hatches into the cosmopolitan Terrestrial. Mychorrhizal networks, interspecies transmissions, mathematically precise patterns and mutualism inspire this work. Algorithmic plant patterns float in abstracted compositions. Landscapes mix plants out of season and geographic location. Acacia thorns provide protection. Fire, water and air compose a split screen. Plants, fungi and lichen perform the metabolic songs of networks through wired telephones, old cans, and vintage microphones. Large drawings of phytomorphs or people in plant forms suggest a fabulist future. These works surround a submarine along the center of the floor, a whale from the human subconscious forming a rubble pile of archeological tile forms, art objects, passenger dolls and periscopes that survey the vista through mammalian senses. A current of sound runs through the Submarine of war, of work, of stealth, of humor, submerged, sub-colonial, subliminal, sublime, surging, streaming, sinking and surfacing from our dark waters.

Surfacing Sound: Performance on March 13 by Chris Brown and Laetitia Sonami

https://vimeo.com/692836556

Review in Daily Californian

https://www.dailycal.org/2022/02/23/listening-to-lichen-johanna-poethigs-hideouts-escape-hatches-and-a-submarine-unites-biology-technology/