WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEREMY EVERETT
Photographer Jeremy Everett captures America’s abandoned marble quarries—defective monuments once used for monoliths and headstones that now sit empty, embedded into the earth as skeletons of forgotten landscapes and scenes of hollowed histories set in stone.
This is a proposal for a defective monument, a remnant void left from the extraction of a century’s worth of the purest marble used to build American monoliths and headstones…and all that remains are two amphitheaters the size of the Metropolitan Opera hidden inside of an anonymous mountain. Possibly, the truest American monument.
What does this space become when I fill the void with sound and play the same song on repeat? A car accident in which no one got hurt? As I drop this sacred stone down the side of a mountain and document it cascading through the air, does the raw visual moment become the new monument of collapse?
As rocks fall through abandoned marble quarries across America, the growls of Earth’s hardened underbelly echo landscapes forgotten—a dance of intense, visual violence—and with this, our perception of its natural murals: caves of stubborn edges, fading through light and sound as monuments turn into memorials.
PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT Tyler Millard
Neo-Natural is a study of humankind's relationship to nature in the age of climate change, including topics such as resource depletion and regeneration, gene editing, cellular agriculture, and the increasingly inarguable effects of the Anthropocene on indigenous communities around the globe. It features contributions from artists like Yoko Ono, ANOHNI, Ryan McGinley, Daniel Beltra, and more, all attempting to answer the question: What does "natural" mean in the modern world?
The American Monument
