I'm here. Now What?

I'm here. Now What? is an ongoing collaborative project between Christopher Carroll and Lilly McElroy. This ongoing project takes many forms but is centered around this self-titled performative video created in 2017. The performative video is manifest through a roughly constructed stage set in the deep wilderness of Maine. Carroll and McElroy perform actions for a camera through which they challenge, defeat, observe, soothe, and worship nature.

In each of their respective practices, artists Carroll and McElroy engage with the natural world through performative actions, ranging from the exploratory to the absurd, in order to both dismantle traditional, romantic images of Nature and reimagine them from a contemporary perspective. Carroll and McElroy intrude upon a wilderness in which they can never completely belong, yet, drawing upon Agamben’s notion of shifting realities, they nevertheless confront this separation, demonstrating their own hubristic tendencies in the process.

There does not exist a forest as an objectively fixed environment: there exists a forest for the park ranger, a forest for the hunter, a forest for the botanist, a forest for the wayfarer, a forest for the nature lover, a forest for the carpenter, and finally a fable forest in which Little Red Riding Hood loses her way.

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal