Leviathan Rising

Leviathan Rising is Eirik Johnson's exploration of oceanic trade, environmental fragility, and the beastly machinery that carries cargo through uncertain waters. From a kayak, Johnson photographs the abstracted spaces beneath the hulls of massive transoceanic barges as they idle in the Duwamish, a deeply polluted river ecosystem in Seattle that flows into the Salish Sea, before threading the Inside Passage to and from Alaskan waters and to ports along the Pacific Rim. Beneath these hulls, new architectural spaces emerge and scale and light distort; a quiet vertigo sets in.

Leviathan Rising also contains a series of unique daguerreotype photograms, created in collaboration with Daniel Carrillo, depicting glass floats used by early-twentieth-century Japanese fishermen to suspend their nets in the Pacific Ocean. If the floats broke free from their netting, the ocean’s currents conveyed the spheres east, ultimately reaching the shores of the Pacific Northwest. The reflective surface of these silver plates contains the frozen imprint of each float’s journey across the Pacific.

Sylvia Wolf, director emerita of the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, contributes an essay on a site-specific installation of this body of work, and LA-based musician and writer Sam Hockley-Smith addresses the sound component of the exhibited work, composed of aquatic field recordings that Johnson made beneath the surface of the Duwamish. Leviathan Rising’s arresting images of the daunting structures that carry commercial cargo across global waters and these thought-provoking texts compellingly address oceanic commerce and environmental fragility in our uncertain era.