“Smoke Trails” is a multimedia project that includes 3D prints, video and an artist book to portray the Empire of Smoke (EoS 10^15), a fictional global industrial quadrillionaire family. This project scrutinizes questionable wealth provenance and the development of the Capitalocene, our present geological epoch defined by the irrevocable impact capitalism and extractivism have on planetary health.
Text by Danni Shen for the group exhibition Collaborative Survival at 601ArtSpace:
Beatrice Glow interrogates the visual languages of luxury and power derived through the exploitation of natural resources. Smoke Trails (2021) features the catalogue and virtual smoking room of a fictional private family collection of the near future, in which the mysterious quadrillionaire legacy named Empire of Smoke (EoS 10^15), has self-enriched through centuries investing in businesses related to airborne substances, from tobacco to gunpowder, and vape culture to bioweapons. Glow’s project also displays a range of 3D-printed fictional artifacts linked to the tobacco plant’s labor, mercantile, settler-colonial, and social history. According to the artist, “the planetary awareness vaguely imagined by white Western humans in fantasies about Spice Islands and global trade is now upon us...One finds oneself in a living world much more vast than that constituted by humans. Whose place is it anyway?” In 1847, Marx wrote “all that is solid melts into air” conjuring visions of smokestacks and steam engines of industrial revolution-era Europe. Smoke Trails pushes further on this idea of the solidification as well as dissolution of capital as accumulated through injustice. Glow’s project scrutinizes wealth provenance in order to expose which humans have been primarily responsible for extractivism’s planetary effects, facilitated through the simultaneous objectification and abstraction of those deemed “lesser human,” “nonhuman,” and “nature.”
An artist book created in collaboration between Beatrice Glow and Jeong-A Kim
The Collection of the EoS 10^15 is an artist book that takes on the form of an auction catalogue for a sale by a quadrillionaire family dubbed the "Empire of Smoke (EoS 10^15)." Set in 2068, the EoS 10^15 is relocating into a remote bunker as the Earth has become increasingly uninhabitable through environmental degradation, widespread social unrest and ceaseless waves of global pandemics. Since their vast wealth derives from 17th century Spice Wars and the tobacco trade as well as their deep financial ties to the military-industrial complex, the catalogue showcases family possessions reflecting their virulent capitalist heritage and consumption-driven lifestyle over generations. Glow used VR, 3D modeling and printing, and fine craftsmanship to create both digital and physical works spanning unique paintings, decadent toys, tobacco paraphernalia, luxurious jewelry to rare perfume bottles. Jeong-A Kim (art historian and researcher) wrote the text with Glow. Together, Glow and Kim set out to create a book that touches on the true, somber historical facts behind the satirical, haunting aesthetic manifested in the objects yet imagines an alternative history and future dominated by this family. The distorted history and slanted future reflected in the writing is intended to raise a clarion call about the dire consequences of our extractive economy against a backdrop of severe climate change.
Part online viewing room, exhibition and artist multiples and editions gallery, Nicot & Tang, “the premier auction house for taste-makers seeking the most eclectic art and luxury objects” is presenting the 2068 mocktion of the collection of the EoS10^15.
Acknowledgements:
Early research and production support for this work was realized with the generous support of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and the National Numismatic Collection, Smithsonian National Museum of American History through the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, as well as the Yale-NUS College Artist-in-Residence Programme.