Geo-Ontological: Artists Contemplating Deep Time explores the anthropological entanglements that exist within, and between, geophysical life worlds. Deep time, as first described by the Scottish geologist James Hutton in 1788 and as literally written in the segmented and stratified layers of the ground beneath our feet, “represents a certain displacement of the human and the divine from the story of creation.” And yet, geologists now read this rocky text from the vantage point of the Anthropocene, living in the wake of the last century’s Great Acceleration - that dramatic growth in population, jump in consumption, and increase in the output of carbon pollution, plastic production, and radioactive waste. Landscapes have since become evermore altered by massive geo-engineering projects, exploitative strip-mining, and hydraulic fracking techniques, such that human beings are now insinuated, ironically, as “that sublime force, the agents of a fearful something that is greater than ourselves.”

The work of the ten contemporary artists in Geo-ontological move effortlessly both backwards and forwards throughout this expansive temporal-spatiality, mapping events of terrestrial stratification and upheaval, as well as imagining the possible future(s) of a post-human ecosystem.