Across the eight-part lightbox series Burning Glass, Reading Stone, the Blackwood activates a Reader-in-Residence program that brings eight readers into dialogue with eight suites of images. Adapting the familiar artist’s residency format to one that focuses on practices of reading—reading an exhibition, reading a text, reading as interpretation—each reader-in-residence respond to a specific series of works presented in the Blackwood Gallery’s lightboxes.

In this instalment, Reader-in-Residence Laurie Kang responds to Oscar Santillán’s project Solaris.

Octavia Butler’s Earthseed is a sound work and “reading” of select passages of scriptures from Earthseed, the religion spanning Octavia Butler’s Parable series. Kang’s voice recording was processed by a synthesizer aptly named The Matriarch. The Matriarch translates, digests, and regurgitates the artist’s voice, producing an ambient soundtrack to presents and futures.

An accompanying image (made by photographing a sunflower through one of Santillán’s lenses made of desert sand) attests to the multiple process of mediation, emergence, and ecological flourishing at work in both Santillán’s original project, and Kang’s reading. The excerpt from Earthseed appears below.

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Consider: Whether you're a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true.
All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here we are—
Energy,
Mass,
Life,
Shaping Life,
Mind,
Shaping Mind,
God,
Shaping God.
Consider—
We are born
Not with purpose,
But with potential.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Darkness
Gives shape to the light
As light
Shapes the darkness.
Death
Gives shape to life
As life
Shapes death.
The universe
And God
Share this wholeness,
Each
Defining the other.
God
Gives shape to the universe
As the universe
Shapes God.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We have lived before
We will live again
We will be silk,
Stone,
Mind,
Star,
We will be scattered,
Gathered,
Molded,
Probed.
We will live,
And we will serve life.
We will shape God,
And God will shape us
Again,
Always again
Forevermore.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Self is.

Self is body and bodily perception. Self is thought, memory, belief. Self creates. Self destroys. Self learns, discovers, becomes. Self shapes. Self adapts. Self invents its own reasons for being. To shape God, shape Self.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You are Earthseed—
One of many
One unique,
One small seed,
One great promise.
Tenacious of life,
Shaper of God,
Water,
Fire,
Sculptor,
Clay,
You are Earthseed!
And your Destiny,
The Destiny of Earthseed,
Is to take root
Among the stars.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Are you Earthseed?
Do you believe?
Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action—
Or it does nothing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We give our dead
To the orchards
And the groves.
We give our dead
To life

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Special thanks to Kieran Adams for sound processing.