Miles Coolidge Snags
October 8th thru November 5th

Miles Coolidge’s analog installation Snags consists of 40 photographs of fallen trees taken with a medium format camera and projected with medium format slide projectors. Shot on an island in New Hampshire Coolidge has frequented since childhood, many of the recently downed trees have been knocked askew by increasingly violent wind events due to global warming. As with other work, Coolidge queries photographic representation by how he frames his subjects, in this instance by reorienting the horizon line so that each fallen tree (ones caught on the limbs of their neighbors) appears as a central vertical line. Each slide projects for 32 seconds- long enough to contemplate, as well as to disrupt a cinematic persistence of vision and memory. The reframed horizon lines are positioned to alternate 90 degrees to the left then 90 degrees to the right, creating a pendulum effect that undoes linearity. The result is hypnotic and mesmerizing.

But this is neither the place of a sublime exalted nature or “mother nature” as a “fierce adversary” as Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis recently characterized hurricane Ian. It is the place where uncertainty and subjectivity intertwine. The viewer is destabilized and continuum is disrupted (a through thread in much of his art). Coolidge says of this work “the consistent figure of a paradoxically perpendicular fallen tree stands for the desire to maintain a sense of coherent subjectivity in the face of inescapable entropic forces.” I would add the place of uncertainty he places us in, as the late feminist scholar and activist Ann Snitow wrote, also allows us to affectively perceive the potential of creativity and innovative thinking that exist next to the elements of fear and denial. Coolidge’s work takes one to the place where they are not so much observing nature as “thinking alongside” with it. A place where, as writer Octavia E. Butler has observed change is embraced as a constant and symbiosis is realized.

- Connie Samaras