Gridlock in the Holocene

Cast concrete, found objects & stain
42.5" x 24" x 14"
$3,000

I cast this sculpture in concrete as an invented cross-section of sedimentary strata tilted along a diagonal axis the way you see in landscapes shaped by plate tectonics, where deep time has been folded and pushed out of level. Embedded within its layers are fossilized ferns, bones, and ammonites, the familiar record of deep geological history, but running through the strata is another band entirely: what I think of as the fossil fool’s layer, the human layer, a thin and unmistakable band of fossilized automobiles marking the petroleum era the same way an ammonite marks the Jurassic. The piece imagines our own moment as an archaeological deposit yet to be excavated, our present already fossilized and read back to us as evidence, congestion and combustion preserved in stone alongside ferns and shells as if they were always part of the same continuum. It's a speculative relic from a future that looks back at the Holocene the way we look back at the Cambrian—one more stratum, one more extinction event, with the traffic jam as its most telling fossil.