Kōrero Toi: Ken Faber

ARTS | ISSUE THREE | WHENUA

Written by Ken Faber (they/he) | @_kekeno_ | Contributing Artist

The End We Are Together confronts the internal biases rooted in the ideology of the Anthropocene - Eurocentrism, chronocentrism, and anthropocentrism - clawing at its reifications of the innate sin of humanity in causing our extinction. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. 

Egg tempera is a naturally occurring emulsion, a nonbinary combination of oil and water. The paint I have produced and used in these paintings emulates a genderqueer transcendence of the false binaries of capitalism - male and female, human and nature, self and other. The merging sequences of the Cretaceous and Capitalocene extinctions question our agency and comprehension of an end already past.

The radioactive luminescence of the painted sketch, the trace fossils of the goathair brush, and the light catching in the dancing gestures of feathers, reveal a sense of lived being - myself, the subjects, the mediums themselves - by highlighting what is usually concealed in a painting. The dinosaurs counteract pop-culture depictions of mindless monsters: their feathers contradict the gender expectations imposed on women to be hairless and skinny; their iridescent relationships with each other emphasise their agency as living beings outside of heteronormative, anthropocentric logic.

The meteorite penetrates everything. Transparency shows each gesture, as I paint up, scrub away, paint up, fighting the permanency of the tempera, remembering things I try to erase. It hovers over our heads, painted on diatomaceous fragments industrially harvested a hundred million years ago for your basement floor. 

Look into the sun and see the halo of the incoming meteorite. Can you see it coming?