Exhibit featuring artists Tiana Birrell, Collin Bradford, and Ron Linn
The earth itself is a record, a layered palimpsest of geologic eras in stacked strata. The first modern geologists, departing from James Hutton’s discovery of his famous “unconformity” in 1789, recognized that they could read in these layers a vast history, far more active, varied, and intensely more vast in scope than had ever been conceived. In the wide-open spaces of Utah where we make our home, this record is exposed in the spines of the Wasatch mountains that tower over our cities, in the expanses of red rock that ripple and fold across the south of the state, in the canyons which inch by striped inch carve into the Colorado Plateau. One doesn’t even need to be a geologist to recognize the near fluid lines of these past layers which also form our own seemingly solid present.
An object as simple as a rock contains a record of its own history and the deep time in which it was formed. There is the old saying, “If these walls could speak,” hinting at the things we might learn from those silent witnesses to our lives. As humans we tend to think on the level of our own scale, in both size and time, but in the span of the life of a rock, something like a wall is a mere blot on the page. What if these rocks could speak?
What would they tell us about our own part in this temporary arrangement of materials that surrounds us?
Writer Annie Dillard, in her essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk” suggests that “We [humans] are here to witness….all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it. We can stage our own act on this planet—build our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils—but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain.” The witnessing of the geologic gives us the chance to see ourselves as small, and yet part of the whole, the continuous interchanging of matter that is the earth. The strange time that results in this suddenly expanded view is both disorienting and reorienting; in it we lose and find ourselves again. And, perhaps, it is in this same strange time that we can finally understand the language in which the stone speaks to us.