Aquatic Explorations II : ARON LOUIS COHEN

The aquatic explorations series began after I first started hearing about the pacific gyre garbage patch. The gyre is an area in the ocean with no currents. It is like the center of a great whirlpool. All the plastic in the ocean floats there and never leaves. The Gyre became a point of thought for me because it represented a very abstract example of humanity’s effect on the earth. News reports told us there was a lot of plastic there, but because of its remoteness, no images of the place where published or could be found online. The public was asked to use their imagination to comprehend something that was incomprehensible. Myths about the place quickly formed. People began to refer to the place as a garbage island. From my research I knew this not to be true, I thought a better description of the place was a floating world of plastic. In a way though, the myths that formed where a more effective tool of consciousness raising than the actual facts. My goal in creating this series was to continue the myth making process, to produce images of a place that existed in realty, but whose appearance only existed in my mind. The series was a way to empathize with a place I could neither see or go to. I asked myself what would it be like to dive there? What would a fish's view be? and what would a scientist’s view of this place look like? All the images combine to paint a picture of the this world which until this point had only existed as abstract fears in my mind. I felt that to imagine and even portray an incomprehensible frightening place of wildness was to in some way strengthen and acknowledge its existence and perhaps that could lead to a place of caring and a desire to act toward change.

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Archival Ink Jet Print, 2010