“Code Orange” Marcus Civin on Britt Ransom
you cannot put rocks in your pocket(s), 2016, by American artist Britt Ransom, consists of one hundred sixty-two plastic pieces. Every piece is a precise 3D printed replica of one of five stones or a small fossil Ransom found on a research trip to Svalbard, a group of Norwegian islands, about six hundred and fifty miles from the North Pole. In June 2014, the artist participated in The Arctic Circle residency and used technology to probe human/environmental interaction. She lived and worked with other artists, writers, and researchers on and around the tall ship The Antigua for twenty days in the vicinity of melting glaciers, relics of Russian whaling and coal mining, and hungry polar bears, walruses, and seals.
These days, Ransom compares her lightweight plastic replicas to loose change, describing the largest as just larger than a fifty-cent piece and the smallest as about the size of a dime. She exhibits them on orange supports reminiscent of the similarly colored ski pants she wore in the Arctic. To and from The Antigua, she carefully transported her slight, craggy finds in these ski pant pockets. Onboard, she scanned them using an app installed on her phone before bringing them back to the islands. But she didn’t return them exactly where she found them. Instead, she marked Svalbard discretely by displacing the six small items, holding onto them, then tenderly leaving each about a day’s journey away the next time she returned to land. The originals Ransom found, scanned, and returned were different colors. Speaking with me on a recent video call, she remembered pink, green, and jet black. The replicas are middle gray, a standard color for 3D modeling.
Ransom has so far exhibited you cannot put rocks in your pocket(s) three times in roughly the same way: the all-gray pieces mostly on their longer sides, grouped in tight clusters resembling circular piles of debris or sorted gravel. In an exhibition at The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Art Galleries in 2017, Ransom made ten piles on a low, orange plinth. As a part of Glendale Tech week in California in 2019, she installed the pieces on a rectangular orange table. The year before, at the no longer active Pacific Court Galleries in Long Beach, she centered three clusters on three low, stairstep orange pedestals. Orange tape lines surrounded the pedestals on the floor, making a heptagon shape not unlike a simplified aerial view of a floating ice chunk that has broken off from a larger mass in warming Arctic waters.
The title of Ransom’s work calls to mind the British writer Virginia Woolf who wrote a suicide note to her husband in March of 1941, suffering from what she described as a terrible disease. She couldn’t concentrate. She heard voices. After writing the suicide note, she reportedly filled her overcoat pockets with rocks and drowned herself in England’s River Ouse. Among her final words, she wrote: “I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me, you could work.”
In acknowledging 21st-century environmental devastation, we must recognize the extent to which we are spoiling the chances for the survival of our species. Ecological devastation is suicide. Conversely, geologists think we have inadvertently invented a new rock, plastiglomerate, that will outlive us all. A cousin to Ransom’s 3D printed forms, it materializes from fires where plastic melts and gloms onto organic debris. Metaphorically speaking, we all have some kind of rocks in our pockets, even if we don’t regularly acknowledge how they got there.
In his 2017 book, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and the Environment Today, T.J. Demos advocates for a more precise terminology for our precarious geological age that would address the damage done by industry, colonialism, capitalism, and communism. He entertains, for example, the idea of this as the plastic age. We could use the term Plasticine instead of Anthropocene to mark the industrial and commercial proliferation of plastic. According to official estimates, globally, we produce between three hundred and four hundred million tons of plastic annually. In this light, you cannot put rocks in your pocket(s) is endemic to our age, an exemplary work of the Plasticine, perhaps even a rendering of landscape in contemporary terms. In Ransom’s plastic piles, with a little imagination, we might be able to see and feel traces or remnants of a chilly beach, icebergs in a strait, or a Northern town, fish fresh from the net, a faraway mountain painted by snow.
After all, Ransom’s subtle sculpture could soon become a vehicle for mourning. Ransom reports that her Arctic Circle Residency guides could map rapid changes to the landscape wrought by global warming. Significant ice masses are gone. You can stand or sail where they used to be. Referring to the melted ice, the guides would say: “We wouldn’t be standing here. We wouldn’t be stopping the ship here.” The summer before, what had been virtually an ice wall, was that summer reduced to what might be defined more modestly as a boulder. How long before that former ice wall diminishes to the size of an ice cube?
Ransom has lived in Columbus, Chicago, Dallas, and Long Beach. In grounding herself and her work in new places, as she did in the Arctic, she always investigates the features of the natural world that define a place. She’s in New Orleans now, thinking about what is supposedly the oldest tree there (McDonogh Oak at City Park), her family’s history in the area, and this age as a Plantationocene, one defined by ghastly racial hierarchies, corrupt economies of forced labor, and ultimately, battles for civil rights. She regularly visits the venerable tree, fixing it in her memory.
In this way, Ransom expresses a kinship with an artist like Vija Celmins. Often working from photographs, in graphite, oils, or through printmaking, Celmins meticulously tracks the ineffable, describing oceans, skyscapes, landscapes, and moonscapes. Her work To Fix the Image in Memory, 1977-1982, consists of eleven small stones she found in New Mexico and her painted bronze copies. In this work, it is difficult to distinguish the original from the copy, the rock from “the rock.”
More than ever, we live in a time of the copy and the original. It is not unusual now to move between worlds. We are in-person and virtual, adaptively digital and physical. We hope, and we are uncertain. We try to improve, but we are weary too. Relevant to this context, Ransom has produced a meditation on the play between real and unreal, relying on the literalness of machine reproduction. The Arctic is too distant, too rugged, too austere and frightening for many of us to visit. So, Ransom took renderings of small parts of the Arctic and made them resonate. The power in these objects is their ability to broadcast. They are nearly immaterial traces, or copies of traces, but they are significant. They indicate that if we’re not yet at a code-red-level emergency, if maybe our collective intelligence and creativity can help us out some, alas, we’re still in trouble. I’m sorry to say it, but, reading Ransom, it seems we’re at least at code orange.
Britt Ransom is half black queer artist currently based between New Orleans, Louisiana and Long Beach, California. Ransom is currently serving as the Associate Director of theSchool of Art at California State University Long Beach where she is also an Associate Professor specializing in digital fabrication as well as kinetics and electronics.Ransom is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and residencies including the Joan Mitchell Center Residency (upcoming 2021), Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator / LACI (2019-2020), ZERO1 American Arts Incubator Fellowship (2019),Workshop Residency-San Francisco (2016), to list a few.Her most recent work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Chicago, Berlin-Transmediale, and Dallas. Ransom’s writing has been featured in numerous publications including in the Leonardo Journal published by MIT Press (2019), The 3D Additvist Cookbook (2016), and The Routledge Handbook on Biology in Art, Architecture, and Design, Routledge Press Essay (2016), and most recently In and Out of View: Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship (2021).
