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A Blue Whale crashes onto an elite beach. Its carcass a downed-jet avatar. Marine biologists take samples, remove its eye, carve a cavity. The Blue Whale’s scale, shredding and terrestrial position, challenge understanding, drawing onlookers, dislocated in space and time.
I loop North America, capturing human interactions with whale remains searching for a still point in cavities, necro-transformations, and patterns which defy our narratives with nature. Instinct leads me to Baja’s volcanic landscape.
There, a crash-test L1011 basks beside the Mexicali highway. Air Whale. On a remote ridge, whale skeletons assembled by a long dead fisherman, appear ready for flight, taxiing overland.
Las Islas Encantadas breach and dive. A Dead Man, The Saint, and the Little Orphan Boy appear to zoom larger the longer the distance. These islands are the whales’ landscape. Their images shift positions on the sea, conflicting with physical logic.
In Santos, the photographs form a web of interconnected moments. On a remote Baja beach, coyotes alert the lens to a stranded Beaked Whale. A trawler levitates into the night sky, denying the constraints of time. Stars streak the sea, evoking an immersed net. In displaced images, the eye confronts a paradoxical landscape: movement in stillness.
–Johanna Case-Hofmeister
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