Cool Hunter Predictions: Kai Wasikowski

“Foot falls echo in the memory/down the passage we did not take/towards the door we never opened…” American poet and essay- ist T.S. Eliot wrote in his set of poems Four Quartets in 1936. Using the journey through this mysterious garden scene, Eliott warned his readers of post modernity’s looming dangers – exploring ideas of labour, environment, production and human destruction. Decades later in our present, these concerns described in Eliot’s impermanent world still loom over humanity, and our relationship with the natural world.

Attuned to the acoustics of our time, Sydney-based artist Kai Wasikowski prompts a similar vein of philosophical and poetic reflection in his photographic landscapes. For the artist, nature and its importance to our survival serves as both concept and concern. Within his surreal dreamscapes, layers of nature emerge from foggy and mysterious rivers and seabeds. In the midst of these seemingly static scenes, movement lurks in the background. In the case of the Realtree (2018) works, red laser dots zero in on their target, catching on the trees and bushes in this pristine, almost too-perfect landscape. These images depict a danger zone and Wasikowski places us on high alert. In an era where human-made climate change threatens the elemental status quo, Wasikowski uses the metaphor of this earthly conflict zone to reveal and conceal, in equal measure, a narrative about humankind’s effect on nature.