Works & Days, 2016
On January 8, 2016 a group of scientists published an article describing the details of a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Their report illustrates how the study of stratigraphic layers proves the influence human behavior has had on climate change and subsequently the planet from as early as the mid twentieth century. This geological time scale shift activates a method of reflecting back on the advent of agriculture and the industrial revolution.
Works & Days takes as a starting point the farmer’s almanac – historically a collection of long range weather forecasts, aphorisms, and entertainment for the farmer and ameteur gardner alike. The exhibition’s namesake is Hesiod’s Works & Days, part didactic poem and part almanac set against an agrarian crisis in Greece around 700 BCE. The almanac, once produced by Hesiod and later Philadelphia's own Benjamin Franklin, enabled me to think through complex environmental and political ecologies by connecting Philadelphia to Ancient Greece.
Hesiod was often criticized for being small minded, too set within his own local landscape. “But a bitter family quarrel over a small local farm is placed within the context of the five ages of man and Prometheus’s struggle with Zeus. Far from a blinkered horizon, these broadened vistas enlarge the local poet’s concerns into something approaching Homer’s universal themes." Like Hesiod, I have been on most accounts, stuck on the map in Philadelphia. In acknowledging the compression of time fostered by the naming of a new era, I am able to incorporate hyperlocal references with a galaxy view of the mythological, social and environmental realities at work in my hometown Philadelphia.