The Long Shadow of a Short Time

- By Brent Mazerolle

If you are not a stratigrapher, and few of us are, you might not know off the top of your head that the earth is considered to have gone through 38 epochs over the course of its 4.6 billion years. For those keeping score, we have been in the Holocene epoch for 11,700 years now.

Stratigraphers are geologists specializing in the ways the layers of rock strata can help us understand the earth’s history over geological time. Gravity and geology dictate archaeology. The deeper you dig to find something, the older the artifact is.  

The epoch everyone’s talking about these days is the Anthropocene, even though it doesn’t officially exist.

Many scientists, philosophers, artists, thinkers and political leaders increasingly use the term Anthropocene to describe how the earth has been so dramatically impacted in what is a split second, geologically speaking. This time, it’s not volcanoes, earthquakes or an extinction level asteroid that hammered the earth and forged a new epoch.  It’s us, humans, as the Latin term Anthro suggests.

After years of research and healthy scientific debate, a growing number of stratigraphers believe we should declare the times we are in to be a new epoch. They even suggest a date, 1950, as the start of the Anthropocene, so the birthday cake should say, “Happy 75th Birthday!” if anyone is thinking of picking one up. If you’re partying with the stratigraphers, you’ll want to make sure it’s a layer cake.

Not that there is much to celebrate. First, the International Union of Geological Sciences voted last March to not officially declare the Anthropocene a new formal epoch after all – in part because as much as humans have affected the earth, the actual strata of the earth’s crust have not been conclusively affected.

The second reason to not break out birthday candles and party hats? The human era may not have quite cracked the strata of the ancient bedrock, but the footprint of humanity has pretty much stomped on everything else. Our soil, water, and air -- and the plant and animal life that depend on them -- have been harmed in ways that range from barely discernible to utterly disastrous.

Our whole time on earth is the snap of the fingers in geological time. And if you use that analogy, the last 75 measly years when we really frigged things up? The infinitesimally tiny space between your fingers and your snapping thumb.

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The last 75 years coincide with the proliferation of plastic. Today, plastics are everywhere. Microplastics are everywhere-er. They’re in our world and the foods we eat and of course in us. Scientists say there’s enough plastic in our brains these days to make a plastic spoon. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, but having a spoon’s worth of plastic in your brain is a tough pill to swallow.                                                

Here, on the corner of Record and Foundry streets, we stand where the Mi’kmaq for centuries camped at least part of each year, as they harvested the now forgotten bounty of the Petitcodiac river valley – salmon and eels, shad and gaspereau, samphire and goose-tongue greens. For thousands of years this river valley sustained the lives of the people who lived along its banks.

Today, Moncton is toxic. Or at least most of downtown is, the contaminated legacy of the heavy industries that once sprawled here. The corner of Record and Foundry is the site of the old Record Foundry, just one of those industries. The ICR shops were nearby along Albert Street and most everything between Main Street and the Petitcodiac from the West End to Dieppe was industrial land until not so many decades ago.

Now with each new development, the toxins get tucked away, entombed beneath curated layers of clay or asphalt or both. When the contamination level is higher, the topsoil gets trucked away to specially designed cells lined with, you guessed it – specially designed plastics -- to prevent seepage into groundwater. A cell game shell game we’ll have to hope our heirs can figure out in the coming centuries.

Some of those cells are at the old garbage dump that once lined the north bank of the Petitcodiac all the way from the Gunningsville Bridge, changing the very topography of the river valley where the bulldozers pushed the garbage layer by layer up into the hills that now stand -- and vent methane -- just south of West Main, Moncton’s immoral high ground.

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The surface of each large canvas in David Brooks’s Dancing into the Anthropocene series is complex and detailed. We all see what we want to see in his abstract forms. Sometimes you see a form he intended. Sometimes you see things you intended to see even if they’re not there. Sometimes you see something that isn’t just your imagination but may have not been in the artist's imagination or intent either. It’s really there, whether or not either of you expected it.

That’s just the surface of the paintings. There are other things lurking beneath that top layer of paint, and beneath that penultimate layer of paint, and so on and so on down to the blank canvas that came before the first moment of creation. As in stratigraphy, the deeper you dig to find something, the older the artifact is.

You see something in the shadows or hiding behind something else and after you look away, you are no longer sure what you saw was ever really there.  Brooks describes his works as having a subcutaneous quality.

The last layers the artist paints, which are the first layers an observer sees, take inspiration from the waste people find practically anywhere in this putative Anthropocene. Most of the garbage portrayed in the painting is plastic, just as it is in our environment. And just as even plastic breaks down and changes form in our environment, the old bottles and jar lids in the paintings aren’t always recognizable as the actual objects they are modelled on.

Not that the garbage in the paintings and the artist’s companion sculptures built from plastic waste are the sole materials or subject of the works.  The works are depictions of our environment, not necessarily depictions or a statement of environmentalism.

The other source materials and inspirations of the canvases come from a number of 17th century Dutch and French paintings, among other things. Brooks’s images come from combining something old with something new, old things meant to be preserved and new things meant to be discarded.

“What I get a jolt out of is when I take that painting and overlay the image of plastics,” he says. “As you’re painting, opportunities arise out of the hybrid of the two things. That is the fun, the unpredictability of it. That offers new possibilities.”

The density of the old source paintings interested him, but also the fact they were produced for the enjoyment of the one percent, not the common people. Unless you were a house servant, no one but the rich and their friends ever saw the paintings.

The paintings also dealt with elitist ideas, myths and religious subjects and other matters those who weren’t always scratching for their next meal had the luxury of time to contemplate.

By contrast, art has been democratized today. We are all consumers now. By the same token, of course, we are all now consumers of everything, including natural resources more precious than any art.

Dancing into the Anthropocene provides all of us an opportunity to reflect now on what we have done to create a world-changing epoch in everything but official name. The works can inspire us to think both about what we take from this world, and about what we leave behind.