Clouds, electronics, fog, bugs, glass, cellophane, rust, weeds, waves, particles… LA photographer Mike Slack (Walking in Place 1: New Orleans, Perimeter Editions/The Ice Plant, 2016) delves into an overheated terrestrial ecosystem in The Transverse Path, surveying a luminous topography of monumental details and mundane vistas with cosmic curiosity. Transcendental in mood, Slack’s vaguely sci-fi photographs envision a sun-blasted wilderness of synthetic and organic stuff, all tangled together, flourishing and disintegrating on its own terms, as if engaged in an ageless negotiation (or flirtation?) just beyond our grasp. Where does nature end and its opposite begin? And where do people figure into this balance? Made primarily around the American southwest from 2011 to 2017, these vivid compositions — like a series of thought-bubbles in search of a narrative — are concise and direct, yet driven by an emotional ambivalence that hovers between stark environmental dread and calm intimate reverie.
100 pages, 25.7 x 19cm, hardcover, The Ice Plant (Los Angeles).