Excavation Landscape takes the phenomenon of “free dirt” ads on Craigslist as its subject matter, and three appropriated images and a laptop as its form. The laptop loops a screen recording documenting the artist’s process: obsessive sifting, data collection, and the appropriation of images and text from these “free dirt” ads. Three images, taken from the ads, have been enlarged and printed far beyond their low resolution capacity.
Accompanying the video, an audio recording of Eleniak reading the collected ad text points to posters’ recurrent language describing the “purity” or “cleanliness” of the dirt; descriptors that parallel the Western ideal of the “pristine landscape.” The three photographs emphasize the particular fiction that undergirds
pixelation, or the incomplete visual information in the photograph, not often visible in digital contexts, but exposed by large-scale print reproduction. The ephemeral nature of the virtual advertisements and the projects they often allude to––slapdash suburban construction, demolition/excavation, landscaping––belie a multitude of histories contained within the mounds of excess dirt. Excavation Landscape considers not only our relationship with these so-called excesses in a time of environmental crisis, but how we might
unintentionally fill “gaps” in digital information with our own received knowledge. In future iterations of this project, Eleniak will explore ways to fill the “information gaps”––decolonizing the histories––of the dirt itself. – Austen Villacis
