Dogs of Future Earth (2018) is a series of digitally created images of the aftermath of ecological disaster, in which humans have become extinct. In these pieces, which combine photo collage and digital drawing, packs of stray dogs inhabit landscapes strewn with human artifacts such as mountains of CRT monitors and pleasure boats fossilizing in a dry lake bed, and the images poke fun at post-apocalyptic science fiction tropes. The dogs in these works are inspired by the real life stray dogs that live in the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, inhabiting abandoned buildings and dilapidated playgrounds.

In these future scenarios, dogs have replaced humans as an omnipresent species. As an opportunistic species that has adapted alongside us for thousands of years, they are an obvious stand-in for humans, but we don’t have the same level of desensitization when we see images of them in disastrous settings. Human violence, poverty and suffering is so ubiquitous in news media and entertainment that is has become difficult to relate emotionally to this imagery. This project addresses truly terrifying possibilities while utilizing the strangeness, and sometimes sweetness and humor, of dog behavior in her imagined future world.