CURTIS ANTHONY BOZIF

“Impermanence rules the sandy marge: dunes form, move, sometimes linger, occasionally erode in great gales or hurricanes, make untenable anything but temporary human buildings, remind the wise of natural system force.”

— John Stilgoe, Orchard Professor of the History of Landscape at Harvard University 

The Dune series is informed by environments of the same name situated in and around the Great Lakes; prominent examples include Indiana Dunes National Park and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. A feature of these environments I’m particularly fascinated by are the foredune stretches of marram grass and little bluestem. The deep roots of these pioneering grasses stabilize the dunes from erosion. In time, a thin, fragile soil forms, becoming the foundation for ecological succession, the process of change of an ecological community.

As a painter, I’m drawn to the abstract qualities of these grasses, especially in winter, when under cool, gray skies their waxy green turns a pale gold and copper. As they mature into dense rhizomatic clumps, they combine to create a rich mesmerizing texture, a thick intertwined mesh of growth and decomposition.

In contrast to this wilderness and flux is the plastic detritus that one increasingly finds accumulated along the beaches of the Great Lakes. Polystyrene, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyvinyl chloride, among others. It’s estimated these synthetic polymers will take thousands of years to break down and, after being buried in sediment, will leave a permanent marker in the geologic record. For me, these bits of plastic function as a metaphor for the contest between wilderness and the human world; a signature of the Anthropocene.

By removing plastic waste from these places and embedding it into the surface of my paintings, I’m trying to emphasize the importance of reducing our use of plastics and eliminating entirely our use of single-use plastics; interfere with the anthropocentric scales of time and space upon which our species relates to the natural world; disrupt a traditional mode of aestheticising the environment, i.e. landscape painting; and challenge the very definition of nature itself.