Sermons in the Soil
Stemming from an investigation of the artist’s home of Durham, NC, Sermons in the Soil interrogates and complicates traditional western understandings of landscape and monument in order to create new visions of myth-making and possibility. Pulling from a conceptual framework rooted in Anna Tsing’s writing and ideas of entanglement and interconnection, which themselves speak to Deleuzian ideas of becoming. The work evokes Avery Gordon’s notion of haunting, as well as Christina Sharpe’s ideas of a past that is not past, in unearthing, reckoning with, and reimagining embedded histories in our surroundings that shape our present. Specificity in material choices such as old notebook paper, charcoal, pine plywood, living plants, found objects, and granite slabs-function as carriers of historical trace for human and non-human stories we often cannot find in history books or archives. Industrial pine framing nods to intersecting histories of labor, land, and lives that exist in the structures and spaces we inhabit.
A charcoal drawing of a fallen confederate monument acts as a decaying landscape embedded on a zone of found notebook paper, creating an opening and sense of possibility where it once occupied the land with a violent revisionist gaze. Two objects found in the ruin of the Mary Duke Biddle estate, a crumbled neo-classical corinthian column cap surrounded by a rhizome of plants atop an inverted combination of industrial, museological, and monument materials, and a piece of leather wallpaper displayed glue-side out as a means to expose “a landscape” of the hands, labor, and lives that created it, demonstrate acts of repositioning andre-contextualization that speak to place and transformation in ways that carry us beyond white-washed narratives of the past.
Much like soil, all of the objects, materials, and works in this show hold memories of labor, violence, care, resilience, and intersectional stories that push back on divisive mythologies, like the Lost Cause of the confederacy. Acts of positioning, embedding, manipulating, and combining speak to alchemical transformation, where the narratives that lay underneath revisionist histories are exposed and reworked into a space for reflection and reimagining., my engagement with this work becomes a process of acknowledgement, surrender, and reckoning with the white southern ancestry that I am implicated within. This work is a call to surrender, to let the land and its stories guide a process of reckoning, repair, and becoming, in relinquishing the grip of oppressive mythologies that actively linger in the residue of time, so as to invoke new generative and emergent possibilities.
Sculpture and drawing works at Lump Gallery, Raleigh, NC.
John Felix Arnold
2025
Folding Space
Space Folding - a fictitious method of faster-than-light travel whereby the space-time continuum is "folded"
This work is a conversation with time, a conversation with the ever constant yet truly elusive existence of time within the structure of our world.The idea of folding space connects to science fiction born concepts of the theorized idea of a wormhole. A wormhole is theorized to be a point of entry which folds both time and space so as to create a portal to a specific point in the fabric of existence which might be vastly different than the point of entry. Simultaneously the idea of ritual, specifically of cleansing fire ritual, is one where notions of spiritual tension or entanglement are released and transformed into a new energy, or a void to make space for growth and awakening. Therein the idea of folding found materials connected to a tumultuous past into positions of interaction and possibility, to create locations of cleansing fire ritual, of sorcery, mysticism and imagined alchemy, coincides deeply with the idea of the portal, of the wormhole. It is the notation of shift in the fabric of our perceived and literal reality. This leads to a change in the possibility of what can be and what might exist on the other side of that portal, of that transformation and process.
Sculptural installation and wall works at Lump Gallery, Raleigh, NC.
John Felix Arnold
2022
Reimagining Cerberus
The site specific sculptural installation in this exhibition is a visualization of a post climate change future with an element of the fantastic to bring it into the realm of mythological metaphor. Aspects of this scene are all too possible in becoming the reality for those on Earth in the coming decades. The piece is centered around the concept of our inherent human reliance on nature for our own survival and existence – a concept that society, as pushed forward by the violent ripple effects of western colonialism and imperialism in all of their shifting and interwoven forms, has so starkly lost sight of. It calls upon our inability to heed or act upon existential crises, but also our inherent ability to adapt and normalize life regardless of circumstance. The piece is representative of a system of interdependence. The car, an agent and symbol of the destruction of our planet both in the systems that create it and are arranged to support its necessity and its direct impact on our surroundings, has been repurposed as a vessel with which to shuttle a large box containing a variety of plants forward in the search for a possible geographic location that can again support life in a new age.
The car, unable to self propel due to a scarcity of fuel, is pulled by a fantastical mythological creature. The polycephalic calf is reminiscent of multi headed beings from a diverse array of mythologies and lore. The animal in many ways draws a connection to the character of Cerberus in Greek myth, acting as a guide in a new world to those who have crossed over into a new phase of existence. Yet here, rather than a feared beast and a guide through a shadow world of Hades, this incarnation of the Cerberus myth is a benevolent nurturing guide through a new world representative of a sort of afterlife or new form of existence. The creature pulls the plants and the survivors of this world forward in a physical manifestation of the possibility for a sustainable existence into the future of this ruined landscape. We as the human arbiters of the destruction of the planet must now humbly be at the mercy of this mythological being of immense power and serenity.
The ground is a visualization of a theoretical geography of the Triangle Area, where massive floods will have washed away clay, soil, rubble, trash, etc, and then suffered extreme and immense prolonged drought and heat. The materials which the Cerberus character stands on were all sourced from different parts of Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill. Red clay from construction sites, rubble and detritus as well from old abandoned business and lots, the list goes on. The reimagined Cerberus offers hope, nurturing, and support, but also requires a real sense of care, responsibility, and nurturing so as to continue to trudge ahead toward awakening and survival. Rather than a guardian hound, the two headed calf represents the concept of seeking and of growth. Its two heads nod to ideas of duality, inherent spiritual power, collectivism, discourse, and perceptions of gender that defy social norms as created by systems of patriarchal power. It is a literal depiction of life on life’s terms, of humility, of the journey of perception, of time, and of a reality which we are creating and may have to shift deeply internally to exist within.
Site specific sculptural installation involving a taxidermy, rubble, rope, a car, a variety of living plants, a reclaimed wood box, a harmonica, and other ephemera.
For Time as a Sanctuary at Anchorlight Gallery
John Felix Arnold
2021