IMAGINARY EXPLOSIONS

Caitlin Berrigan

Imaginary Explosions is an artist book rich with images, poetry, and topographical delineations. The work by artist Caitlin Berrigan has been a few years in the making—fitting for events that span generations. Its pages explore geological ruptures, the immense scale and deep time of sexual violence, and the ways traumas reverberate through bodies across multiple generations of relationships and families. It is an experiment in sequential, narrative poetry. Sparse, material language combines with synthetic landscapes based on the computational radar topography of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. Berrigan takes on the book as a time-based medium, creating a walk through the landscape of the volcano across the pages. It draws from storytelling and geological time and space through episodes of volcanology. Can we begin to grasp the scope and scales of both geological change and the deep time of patriarchy, by in fact becoming mineral ourselves?

Caitlin Berrigan works across performance, video, sculpture, and text to engage with the intimate and embodied dimensions of power, politics, and capitalism. Her work has shown at the Whitney Museum, the Poetry Project, Harvard Carpenter Center, Storefront for Art & Architecture, Hammer Museum, Anthology Film Archives, LACMA, Henry Art Gallery, UnionDocs, and the deCordova Museum, among others. Berrigan has received grants and residencies from the Humboldt Foundation, Skowhegan, Graham Foundation, PROGRAM for Art & Architecture Berlin, and Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Add to your order