consumed
(twice, the river remembered)

Fascinated by the potential eradication of the human presence on the planet, Kai Lossgott has photographed the husks of human waste, searching for evidence that they are being assimilated by the environment.  Like the scientist or theologian, he continues his flirtation with the unrequited.  This new body of work, 'consumed', deliberately persues the fantasy of bio-degradable plastic in stages of advanced decay, in this case in Cape Town's Liesbeek River.

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, in his definitive analogy on the nature of time, said that we cannot step twice into the same stream.  In a similarly fleeting manner, the artist documents, like the skin of a snake or a butterfly pupa, the irrevocable discardments of a species that wears its habitat like a condom.  Ephemeral in their use, random in their finding, these dirt-stained plastic packets are the shrouds which are likely to last longer than human dust and ashes, longer than the photographs taken of them.  They exist in a seemingly interminable 'now'.  

Bearing the platitudes of mass communication, ("Your Daily Bread", "Let your voice make a difference"), weathered, scuffed, stained, torn and abraded, like scars repeatedly picked, they attain the presence of historical objects from the future.  In our globally mediated world of apocalypses, composed daily of disasters worse than the average human being can imagine, humanity no longer denotes humane, nature no longer denotes natural, and "After the end there is no later.  This is later."  (Cormac McCarthy, The Road).  

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