Abundance and the Roof Sentinels

Produced in April 2023, Abundance and the Roof Sentinels presents the following scene. A child in a very pale blue suit and blue helmet marked with a white star touches a large brown woolly animal while carrying a spare helmet. Mixed livestock graze around a white farmhouse beneath small dark birds or aircraft. Helmet and armor turn the body into an interface: identity is partly protected, partly concealed, and partly rewritten through reflective plates, dark screens, and segmented surfaces. Against that engineered shell, the animals contribute irregular fleece, weight, and warmth. Their tactile bodies keep the technological fantasy tied to husbandry and dependence rather than frictionless abstraction. The farmhouse and white fencing stabilize the scene with an inherited American pastoral grammar: property, shelter, cultivation, and an apparently orderly horizon. The small airborne machine unsettles that historical calm, inserting surveillance, mobility, or automated custodianship into the familiar sky above the farm. The title, Abundance and the Roof Sentinels, concentrates attention on the encounter staged here. Its language transforms the pictured relationship into an emblem, allowing an ordinary gesture, costume detail, animal, or line of sight to carry the work’s broader speculative charge. The image should also be read as an April 2023 artifact rather than repaired in prose into something more coherent than it is. At close range, boundaries between hand, tool, string, weapon, and animal sometimes soften or fuse, so the most accurate reading preserves ambiguity instead of assigning false precision. Even the livestock resist strict taxonomy, shifting among sheep, alpaca, calf, buffalo, and invented woolly companion according to texture more readily than anatomy.