Mike Slack - The Transverse Path

Clouds, electronics, fog, bugs, glass, cellophane, rust, weeds, waves, particles: Mike Slack (born 1970) delves into an overheated terrestrial ecosystem in his new book The Transverse Path (or Natures Little Secret), surveying a luminous topography of monumental details and mundane vistas alike with cosmic curiosity. Transcendental in mood, Slacks vaguely sci-fi photographs envision a sun-blasted wilderness of synthetic and organic stuff tangled together, flourishing and disintegrating on its own terms, as if engaged in an ageless negotiation (or flirtation?) just beyond our grasp. Where does nature end and its opposite begin? And where do people figure into this balance? Made primarily around the American Southwest from 2011 to 2017, these vivid photographslike a series of thought bubbles in search of a narrativeare concise and direct, yet driven by an emotional ambivalence that hovers between stark environmental dread and calm intimate reverie.