Kai Barker Dennett: Survival Techniques
2026
colored pencil on paper
9x12”
2026
U.P.O. 4
graphite on paper
9x12”
2026
aluminum trekking pole, The Left
Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, wool sock, nylon webbing, plastic
40x6x4”
2026
Thaw.777
nylon rope, aluminum, packing materials, carabiner
42x12x7”
2026
Various natural materials
10 x 6 x 2 inches
2026
Survival Techniques
Frequently, there is a collapse – a snap, a shattering, an avalanche, a mudslide. It’s easy enough to
point at the human problem, at all the ecological ruin, but far more challenging to see opportunity
in what’s still left. Kai Barker Dennett sees the opportunity in ruins. They build queer possibilities in
speculative ecological futures, and fabricate fragments of worlds not yet known or made.
In Survival Techniques are just a few samples from the recent happenings in Dennett’s studio, all
evocative of archaeological evidence. Thaw.777 is suggestive as a kind of tool, with its handle and
mace-like, neutered end. my right hand also implies use, both in what its constituent parts might
have been before, and in what it is now. We wonder, where did it come from? Who preserved this?
How did they survive? The drawings remind us that we cannot remember what once was so important that it had to be written down. Diagrams are outdated, patents have expired, references have gone extinct, and yet we have these documents. They may have meant something to a distant ancestor, or to a distant descendant, but what do we make of this encoded language? Still, we trust these documents we cannot decipher because of their sureness, the confidence of line and color, the certainty of the forms.
Still denying total legibility, but more haphazard in its making, is an entire site just as fictive in its
functionality and provenance. As a body, this structure must have been a painful birth, a hard-won
corporeal form. Its massiveness is not lost on us either, especially compared to the small nest in the
same room. The body undulates and heaves under piles. Its monstrous form is punctured, pene-
trated, and breathing through many orifices. It embodies multiplicity through queer refusal and
reproduction, through its pragmatism and absurdity, at once a chimerical being and a singularity: a
one-person tent. Implied by the contrast of warm and cool light, and the silvery architectural shad-
ows, we can imagine a snowy expanse for miles beyond this outpost. A community of those who
have survived. Perhaps a vast scientific compound with all the necessities of life (agriculture, hydro-
logical systems, gathering spaces) and research (the resuscitation of long gone species, discovery of new old medicines, examination of still-evolving cell structures). In any of these imaginings, the
perpetual glow of the site’s lamppost is a beacon. It helps us to believe in a future that is cooperative and sustaining. We might not know when, and we might not know where, but in the snowy white pillows of this installation, there is a promise: a time and place where we survive. There is hope that even after disaster, we’ll carry on. -Kennedy Harwood
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