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Snapshot
Collection Spotlight
Underneath, by Violet Bond
Overheard
NFT Photography Gallery at Art Basel
Hello World from AOTM
Underneath
Violet Bond
Presented by Australian artist Violet Bond as a collection of six full color images and three short-form black and white videos, the collection is presented in two parts by varying editorial treatment of the images and thematics. Every image in the collection is accompanied with descriptive prose and haunting poetry which frames a mystery about The Twins, and their lives at the end of the world.
Underneath No. 2, Underneath No. 3, and The Twins could be a triptych. Made of earth and bone and laying in a reddish ground, the creatures are more spirit than human. Laying together foot to head, dressed in bones, and promising a story, they connote a living-dead-ness: life in limbo.
Nudity and the naked female body is used to remind us of the vulnerability of natural, life giving forces. The contact with the earth in Underneath is nothing short of intimate: poetry and prose is written to a lover, and the wild acts to embrace the natural form completely with its dirt, detritus, and natural fauna. Through this anthropomorphic embrace, viewers are brought into undeniable closeness with the wild, making the realities depicted far more personal.
The drama of Underneath plays out in three acts. Scarab, Chrysalis, and Spines and Ash are shot in a natural palette, each accompanied by short form video of the artist getting into position for the assisted self portraits. The three works feature a nude figure being called and pulled from and back into the earth, through an arc that connects to the myth of the Twins.
In Scarab, tendrils grab a nude curled up into the fetal position. The accompanying clip presents an unfolding motion that reverses part way through. Additional commentary from the artist points us in the direction of Egyptian symbolism and resurrection as a motif for the image. The image evokes the hypnotic, cyclical infinity of birth, breath, blooming flowers, and other life-affirming processes.
Chrysalis develops on the theme of nudity and entombment, with the artist rolling into the Earth’s gentle caress and letting herself be pulled in. The body is laid out, breasts exposed. The resulting image is dreamy, seductive stillness: we can almost feel the pull down and under, into the center of the earth. The accompanying clip serves up a reminder that in nature, nothing is ever pure or still.
The day was hot, we had gone down many dirt roads to find the cattle yards and as I lay naked in the baking dirt (which was mainly dried buffalo poo) meat ants started to eat my body.
It felt like the ants thoughts I was just meat, just part of the artwork and the earth and the landscape all at once. Was torturous and tremendous all at the same time.
Violet Bond, “Come to me”
Violet’s commentary breaks the spell of the dream world presented in Underneath, and brings us back to reality, meat eating ants included. The three-act play closes with Spines and ash, Twins returning to their resting place. We’re left with questions about monsters, Twins, and how to read the narrative the collection presents.
The buffalo horns making up tendrils that wrap the body are perhaps the easiest point of entry.
Salvaged from the local mustering industry, these horns represent the complexity involved in restoring the natural balance originally violated by colonists. While some Native American cultures revere buffalo as symbols of life, in Australia they are intruders that wreak havoc on the watering holes that maintain the rest of the biosphere. Mustering (herding) preserves the animal for commercial use, which provides economic viability for Aboriginal tribes, at the expense of effective control of the feral population.
The buffalo in the conversation is that of course, neither concerns about economic viability nor the invasive species would have been a concern if the habitat wasn’t disrupted by intruders in the first place. The gesture of turning these relics into art seems to make a point about the difficult work of restoration.
Underneath is an allegory for the violence perpetrated by colonists on Indigenous populations and the natural environment. Shot in the midst of wrongfully appropriated land, with remains of animals that never should’ve been there in the first place, the whole series carries references to the ways that land and its people had been violated by the course of history.
Through its moon-like landscapes and the materials (animal remains, dirt, the naked human body) used in producing the images, Underneath takes us on a journey to hide with the gods until the rightful owners of the land are able to reclaim it. The whole collection is a prayer for a future where natural cycles are able to proceed uninterrupted by intruders.
That’s our take, but what do you think? Let’s talk about it in the chat.
Overheard
NFT Photography Gallery at Art Basel
Sponsored by Morgan Stanley and National Geographic, the TIMEPieces Photo Gallery at Art Basel Miami will feature 100 artists. Gallery curator John Knopf wrote a thread about the process and the amount of work needed to bring this gallery to life.
Hello World
Art of This Millennium announced their entry into the art world representing 32 contemporary digital artists including photographers Cat Simard, Guido, Drift, Nude Yoga Girl and Reuben Wu. The gallery is dedicated to best in class digital curation of natively-digital art, and we look forward to seeing what they do next.
Letter from the editor
Next week, we’ll be running our monthly retrospective catalog, titled “Not Your Mother’s Nudes”. The monthly Catalog is a special thank you available only to our paid subscribers, as a show of gratitude for supporting our work with PhotoVerso.
This month we’ll be discussing the evolution of the nude photograph as format, including illustrative examples from works we’ve looked at together this month as well as a few others to expand the conversation. Subscribe today so you don’t miss it.