A Setting Sun Volume V, 2024
by Gregg Evans

A Setting Sun is an ongoing project that deals with issues of aging, archaeology, and the passage of time.  It consists of photographs of varied subjects ranging from portraits of everyday objects within my daily life, to photographs of rocks, fossils and recent technologies which already appear dated. In doing so, I ask the questions “What do we leave behind?  How will we be remembered?” without providing easy answers.

I watched a Youtube video the other day about the Silurian Hypothesis - a thought experiment in which scientists speculate if it would be possible that, given the timeline of the history of all life on earth, an undiscovered advanced civilization could have risen and fallen without any traces left today.  Would there be any markers of their existence?  How could we investigate the question of their history after any potential fossils had been crushed by the weight of the geologic record that came after them?  What, if anything, could they have left behind that would stand the test of deep time?  Does everything eventually turn back to molecules and isotopes?

For the past two days my eyes have been burning from the smoke filling the air in New York as a result of the forest fires raging in Quebec.  Last week I read a report that the island of Manhattan is sinking under the weight of all the buildings that have occupied it for the past few hundred years.  A recent study found that 77% of participants were found with microplastics in their blood.  Scientists believe that three isotopes - cesium 137, plutonium 239 and 240 - will leave a defined mark in the geologic record from the atomic blast on July 16th, 1945, 5:29 a.m.  

Are we the Silurians in this thought experiment?  Will we leave behind fossilized Coca-Cola bottles and solar powered phone chargers?  Mount Rushmore and the New York Public Library, Dennis Quaid burning books for warmth?   Will we be remembered by caulking guns and novelty polyester halloween costumes?  

How do we describe a moment before it’s already past?”

Gregg Evans (b. 1983, New York) is an artist working in New York’s Hudson Valley. He holds an MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago and a BFA in Fine Art from the State University of New York at Purchase. Among other exhibitions, he has shown at the Aperture Gallery; New York, The Griffin Museum of Photography; Boston, White Columns; New York, and Photographic Center Northwest; Seattle. He has published four volumes of his ongoing series A Setting Sun with +Kris Graves projects to date and has books in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

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64 pages
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