Obstruction

Jill Ho-You’s work engages with the anxiety, fear, and speculation about the planet’s future by imaging the world after the Anthropocene reaches the predicted climax of catastrophic climate change.

With Jill Ho-You (Associate Professor, Print Media)

Set in a future where biodiversity, the environment, human industry, society, and health have been irreversibly changed, Ho-You’s work memorializes a fleeting past while simultaneously speculating on a precarious future. Examining the interconnectedness of natural and human-made factors in the ecosystem, her work explores the potential for human-driven climate change to unravel the invisible web that keeps these factors in equilibrium.

Through a mixture of print and bio art/print-based installation, the work in this exhibition references familiar urban and industrial landscapes turned strange and uncanny. Oil wells and offshore rigs have become empty and impotent, unable to harvest resources which no longer exist. Complex ecosystems with their flora and fauna are bleached, desiccated, and sterilized. No longer maintained by the inhabitants that constructed them, cities and infrastructure crumble from disuse. The human body is reduced to the cellular mathematics of the vectors and pathogens that infect us with viruses and disease. Catalogued and fixed under the microscopic gaze of an imagined future, things are slowly transformed and reclaimed by mould and bacteria, the agents of decay.