Earthling
Photography by Dario Lasagni
Essay by Lee Relvas
Somewhere on earth there is a cave so large that clouds form within it, and the monkeys who live there inhabit nests constructed from their own saliva. I’ve never seen pictures, but just the fact of its existence perfectly encapsulates the energy emanating from Savannah’s new body of work, a vibration I’d like to call extraterrestrial, if extra equals more, and terra equals earth, and earth equals life. More life!
Under this influence I marvel my way through some thought-experiments: if these sculptures emitted a sound, it’d be a low static, intermittently soothing and ominous … if these sculptures had a smell, it’d be the smell of peat bogs where ancient and perfectly-preserved homosapiens lie…. Like that old queen Hamlet says, there are more things under heaven and earth, and hints of the philosophy dreamt up by these sculptures might be found in their colors, collected from all over the place.
Like the seafood aisle of the supermarket: the enervated brownish-blues and pinks of frozen flesh, and the scuffed blacks, grays, and yellows of the trucks that delivered them there. There are the almost neon taupes found in night-vision footage of reclusive birds whose beaks look like Stone Age tools. Of the many different blackish-greens Savannah uses, I imagine they are sourced from the very oldest forest, moist and sunless and terrifying, with millions of insects seething among the roots, providing pale specks of sheen and gloss. And there’s a red that doesn’t even seem like a color at all but more like a supernatural spirit, a pair of red shoes that turns the wearer into a firebird.
