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I found myself lost in my own dark woods recently while reading something entitled “This 4×6 index card has all the financial advice you’ll ever need.” I’m sure the article’s intent was to allay any fears one may have over the perceived complexities of financial planning. But for me it had the opposite, terror-inducing effect. Not only was I not following any of that advice, I could not with any degree of confidence define more than half of the words contained therein. Suddenly every decision I’d made in life hung dark and heavy overhead. I was swallowed by a shadowy forest of rent checks, benefitless jobs, and minimum payments on student loans. How, through this thicket of wanton fiscal disregard, could the light of a 401(k) or well-diversified mutual fund ever shine? What, in the name of all that’s holy, is a fucking mutual fund?
In artist Stephanie Burke’s reimagining of the Divine Comedy, however, I might be doing just fine. In a series of photographs entitled “Canto,” Burke explores the divinity and transgression found in the everyday world. Burke locates the three stages of Dante’s journey—Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise—in the landscape of the American west. Her Inferno is, fittingly, the desert, where sun-scorched swathes of land seem to caution “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Of course, all warnings possess the hint of a dare, and mankind has flung itself headlong onto this inhospitable terrain, attempting to bend the desert to human will. Burke juxtaposes images of the desert’s menacing beauty with a shot of Las Vegas—that mortal shrine to excess, where sin exists less in neat, concentric circles than a churning 24-hour vortex.
“Canto” runs at rational-park.com through October 5.
