Growth (07-08)

Afterlife (08)

GROWTH:

 

5.29.08

           My most current work is based on the idea of ‘inversion’. The project below is a photo-manipulation series being made into a short book, almost like a comic book, but at the same time nothing at all like a comic book. The format is mainly high production quality images coupled with corresponding and reactive text located across from the image. This project is intended to aestheticize a disturbing relationship between the natural world and accepted cultural practices and impacts of urban expansion, progress, and development; the focus is to intrigue and conversely initiate critical awareness of ecological disconnect, both progressively unintentional and methodically deliberate. The images are of nature’s reclamation, not in the direct violent possibility as a “natural catastrophe,” but rather as a purposeful means of inverse urban expansion. This is an attempt to represent a conscious and deliberately planned invasion by the natural world in hopes of drawing attention to a specific kind of non-environmental compliance or disregard in the human cultural plans for progress and invasive-expansion.
            The idea is that through juxtaposing depictions of an inverse relationship, the culturally sanctioned development and progress can thus be provoked and revealed. At the same time, rather paradoxically, it is also my hope that through various evocative aesthetics and interpretation of a natural sublime like take-over, that the images will also nudge audiences towards a feeling of compulsion, where this reverse take over may be somewhat longed for, almost like romanticized vacation. From recent critiques, this is the direction and combination I feel that I am beginning to approach.

 

 

 

*All images, text, and image sources are original material and are under the copyright of Bret Malley*

 

Cover Page:

 

Tables turned, the underside revealed, impossible inevitability
Plans unfurled, furious organic green greed,
Bottled as biomorphic consciousness,
Elected planners of progress,
Tree trunks transformed to grasp
Directional foresight for reverse transgression

Wet earth smells unsatisfied thirst,
Memory’s thought of ethereal mythos,
An intrinsic integration, the green expansion,
Leaf with life explosive contamination,
Advancement for bio-economic prosperity,
Once fight-less now barbed with methodic teeth,
Hungry, lucrative construction begins to clench and swallow,
Wall mart’s gone greener, poor thing-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pavement, morning green unfurls skyward stretches,
Granite glows yawning, swallowing productively- hominid habitat,
Construction orange replaced by earthen banners,
Rays pink and arid reveal a new zone, no cones, but please drive slowly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red metallic, stop with green spots lit lightly,
A meadow named after a street named after
Trees harvested, an intersection of
Soggy irony with vertical vitality,
The green turns light, all over the city
Yellow sinks sprinkled flashes,
No stopping the schedule,
Pollen progress adjusted buy benadryl

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunsets with deep silhouette conversational silence,
Singing canyon echoes above sprawled hardscapes,
Branches breech rugged radio airspace,
Surrounded, smaller than life’s advance,
Encroachment for claustrophobia, outside and in,
Disorder for nature deficit, don’t need the med’s anymore

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Day reveals falling froth, filling to spilling
Saliva for massive mastication,
Enzymes break and beat and bend a new direction,
Down pounding presumed passage and authoritative right,
Organifest-destiny foams white and brilliant, clear-
Carry an umbrella for the reign

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unexpected eminent domain, a monolithic movement,
Clean Air Acting as circulatory authority, law prescribed,
Regime regulation, warm rock unwavering,
Aromatic presence as floral motif,
Mountain smell, crisp without the freshener

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Floral Street under new oversight-
Soaring to perches constructed conveniently
For progressive reflecting-
Mountains plan and ponder ponds and placement,
New cars, new off-roading, new, the unbeaten path beating off roads,
Stuck in simple novelty,
Time for hiking shoes I guess

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Misty and dank future for
Stucco skin tiled over cheap insides,
Now, aesthetic relics of the previous reason,
City rough parks rage new revenge,
Mounting mountains, moist
Needing as dough as land scraping retribution,
The short drive for forgotten crap at least has
Good scenery sinking in