ROY presents: Shanna Merola
We All Live Downwind
The images in We All Live Downwind are culled from daily headlines – inspired by global and grassroots struggles against the forces of privatization in the face of disaster capitalism. In the Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein writes about the free market driven exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries saying, “the original disaster—the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane — puts the entire population into a state of collective shock”. The scenes in We All Live Downwind, have been carved out of dystopian landscapes in the aftermath of these events.
On the surface, rubble hints at layers of oil and shale, cracked and bubbling from the earth below. Rising from another mound, rows of empty mobile homes bake beneath the summer sun. The bust of small towns left dry in the aftermath of supply and demand. In this place, only fragments of people remain, their mechanical gestures left tending to the chaos on auto. Reduced to survival, their struggle against an increasingly hostile environment goes unnoticed. Beyond the upheaval of production, a bending highway promises never ending expansion - and that low rumble you hear to the west is getting louder.
Shanna’s work is for sale, pricing is available upon request.
ROY asks
What is your name and preferred pronouns:
Shanna Merola – she/ her/ they
How has art (whether it be your own or art in general) changed you?
Art that is challenging, difficult to sit with... art that transgresses boundaries. This kind of work has shaped and informed my practice over the years.
How did you start your artistic practice?
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in unearthing stories about local histories – including the visible and invisible effects of humanity on the landscape. Dioxin, cadmium, arsenic, lead... what happens over time when the human body is exposed to these elements, and what happens to the land? Since the 1960s, southeast Michigan has become a dumping ground for corporations looking to cheaply store and dispose of hazardous waste, often in the backyards of BIPOC communities. From uncovered petroleum coke piles to expanding oil refineries, residents find themselves teetering on the brink of environmental catastrophe. The photographs in “We All Live Downwind” examine the human cost of these extractive economies - across different decades and regions - from my own neighborhood in Detroit, MI, to Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens, and Love Canal, NY.
When a first-time viewer sees your work, what is the first word that you hope they think of when looking at it?
Someone once described the work to me as “nightmare-food”. Pulling from surrealist tropes and sci-fi narratives, We All Live Downwind presents a somewhat distant future where any semblance of the EPA collapses and big oil wins. Regulations all but disappear and unfettered free market capitalism becomes the rule of law. In the aftermath of a full-scale ecological disaster, the fractured earth and its inhabitants are learning to adapt, mutate, and survive.