about Deep End

Deep End, in the collection of Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Bainbridge, WA.

Unique book, hand-painted mixed media  8” x  8”

Deep End is both a celebration of the sea’s rich diversity and a mourning of its impending demise.   As its levels rise and its pH lowers, the sea is losing its ability to sustain life, another collateral victim of our species’ march of progress.  

Gouache, watercolor and ink depictions of strange and beautiful sea creatures recalls 19th C. zoological charts and Cousteau film stills, documenting the oceans in a preindustrial state, teeming with diversity and swarming with life.  On other pages we glimpse the oceans sometime in the near future.  A dimensional script drifts through millions of cubic miles of lifeless water, accompanied only by the litter of human civilization, a civilization that no longer exists on earth.  

Art by Eliana Perez

Book design by Christopher Wilde

Text by Joshua J. Klatt 

Deep End text

Deep End

by Josh Klatt

Cold sea thickened with lives

you’ve met your match.  A casualty of disposable convenience

more terrifying with each addition of tiny synthetic chaff.

Spanned and harvested, saturated with utility,

Swell with pride !

We are your heirs !

We’ll make it quick and painless

(this anthropocenic slap)

barely a moment among the eons you’ve reigned.