ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I share ten digital photos (Figures 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10) and the elongated captions from a larger visual arts project I am working on called A Prairie Elegy for the Discerning Consumer. The work is intended to open an interpretive space to examine the roots of the ecological crisis enmeshed in the field of educational research. More specifically, the work is an interrogation of the leakiness of social-emotional necrosis. The activities surrounding this wild and wilding inquiry shift between walking outside, staging concepts in photographs, research, writing, sculpting objects found outside (in a do no harm ethos), observing other creatures, daydreaming and noting compelling images in the aftermath and re/configuring the material world into megabytes. The images represent the connections I am making among the psychological, political and social dynamism of the retrenchments of late-stage capitalism at the end of the world. Some of the concepts have announced themselves in my head at night and resulted in staged photographs like Beak Wars (Figure 3.2), others like Taming Meme-i-mals (Figure 3.9) pressed themselves upon me while walking outside leading to novel connections. The project has allowed a multiplicity of sensations to bubble up from the unconscious. The work has entranced and alienated me at different stages of the process. Consequently, I understand this project as sur/real storytelling and a process to artfully attune to the world within me and around me.
