Alex A. Jones

Animal sacrifice is one of the oldest and most universal religious rites in human history. However diverse its existential meanings, innate to the practice of animal sacrifice may have been the acknowledgement of death as a necessary creative act, the ritualization of which reinforced bonds of accountability amongst living beings.

Today, at least a million vertebrates are killed each day in the course of perpetuating U.S. roadways, but there is no ritual reverence ascribed to these deaths. The phenomenon we call roadkill instead embodies what anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose called “double death,” the kind of death that renders mortality meaningless, through which “the balance between life and death is over-run, and a relentless cascade is piling up corpses in the land of the living.”

Interstate 80 runs east-west through the middle of the continental United States, passing through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. The embodied experience of driving across it, at cruising speeds that compress the land into scenery, can be cinematic—unless your immersion is broken by the grotesque amount of roadkill lining the highway shoulder. On long stretches of I-80 it is difficult to drive ten seconds between the corpses of deer, coyotes, raccoons, birds, and sometimes-indistinguishable species.

Shay Salehi’s 2025 exhibition Hard Shoulder centers on a virtual road trip down I-80 created with Google Maps, the web-based atlas that integrates cartographic data, satellite photography, and street-level imagery to render the Earth’s roadways with a totality that is equally astonishing and banal. Over the course of a two-hour film called Road Casualties: I-80, Salehi advances click-by-click down a Google Maps replica of the interstate, stopping to examine dead animals using the built-in camera. For Salehi, an artist whose work investigates animal personhood and uncanny living systems, the phenomenon of roadkill cannot be politely ignored. But her gaze is rendered impassive by the digitally-mediated, even tedious method of her looking, so that the work triggers contemplation rather than abjection.

The artist does not seek to memorialize or sensationalize these deaths, but to draw us back into relationship with them. In Hard Shoulder, the highway emerges as a border-zone that reinforces the divide between human and animal. It’s this distinction, of course, that makes it possible to disregard the dead bodies on the road. The phenomenon of roadkill literalizes a difference that is preceded in Western language and thought, which renders animals meaningful primarily through their separateness from the human. While language tends to abstract other animals into symbols, metaphors, and fantasies, interstate highways tend to turn animals into mangled corpses. The project of modernity constructed a separate and overlapping human world—or rather, the illusion of one, perfectly embodied in highways like Interstate 80 that are engineered using millions of tons of dynamite, concrete, and steel to blast “from sea to shining sea.”

Salehi’s use of Google Maps links the technological flattening of reality to the loss of land-based and multispecies ecologies. Google Maps is a direct descendent of the interstate highway system, digitizing its logic of abstraction (and extraction) that upholds human utility, mobility, and standardization as driving values. The digital map is a streamlining interface that continually overwrites old data, just as I-80 is an “update” of older roads. The current freeway sits atop the Lincoln Highway, the first automobile road to cross the continental U.S. in the early 20th century, which was itself re-configured from sections of the Lancaster Turnpike (the first paved highway in the country), the Overland Trail (an important route for stagecoaches in the 19th century), and multiple ancient Native American trails. The latter of these were often the same footpaths made by large animals like deer and buffalo, elder species whose knowledge of sensible overland routes extends millennia into the past.

The modern infrastructure of colonialism and petro-capitalism is designed to erase the presence of other animals, but often fails to do so. Roadkill—whether on the highway itself or its archive in Google Maps—is an accidental trace of estranged ecologies. In Hard Shoulder, Salehi’s artistic gaze lingers on uncanny specimens distorted by the stitching of images in Google’s artificial experience of the road. One is an unfortunate deer depicted in the panoramic print, Ghost Index, whose dead body has been repeatedly stamped on the roadside by a glitch in the software. The fact of the deer’s death is doubled, tripled, multiplied dozens of times; like the stutter of a skipping record, it’s an accident that reverberates.

Salehi’s representations of dead animals are made tolerable to witness by the abstraction of the glitchy, low-resolution imagery. She holds us at a distance—in time, space, and detail—from the corporeality (the corpse-reality) of these deaths. She keeps them comfortably virtual, but insists that they are existential imprints of something real, drawing us deeper into a dialectic of disembodiment and rematerialization. Virtuality is the dislocation from embodiment that alters our perception of what is real, and it’s become an important aesthetic domain for fracturing and opening space in our ontologies. But virtuality also severs us from material worlds, often delivering us to dead-ends of abstraction.

Google Maps has shifted millions of users’ experience of space, place and movement, normalizing a satellite view of the planet derived from technologies of occupation and surveillance. Earlier in the 20th century, the development of interstate travel also offered a new, virtualized experience of the land, turning cross-country travel into a sort of personal cinema for the driver, one which could eventually be set to one’s own soundtrack. (Now with air conditioning!)

Salehi’s video-sculpture You Look, I Look literalizes an automotive cinema. A rear-view mirror hangs in the gallery, and within its frame plays a nighttime video of a deer standing in the road, lit by headlights. One’s own reflection ghosts inside the image of the deer as it looks into the camera. Dangling under the car mirror are a pair of stainless-steel “pine tree” air fresheners, one of the ultimate signifiers of the modern automobile lifestyle, and an object designed to enhance the private environment of the car. These mock air-fresheners are etched with a quote by John Berger:

The animal scrutinizes him across an abyss of non-comprehension, and the man too is looking across a similar, but not identical, abyss of non-comprehension.

The line comes from an immensely influential 1980 essay called “Why Look at Animals?” Often cited as a precursor to the contemporary field of animal studies, this piece makes a moving elegy for the disappearance of the animal from modern human life and its regression into token roles of pet, specimen, toy, and image. Berger makes critical observations about the ways animals are commodified, anthropomorphized, and ultimately dematerialized. But his essay is also quintessentially modern, emphasizing at every juncture the fundamental separateness of man and animal. As encapsulated in the quote above, he casts the animal as a timeless other, a mirror in which man has seen himself and his own symbolic order.

There’s a knowing irony in Salehi’s You Look, I Look, which literally tokenizes Berger’s famous text. Her assemblage presents a fragmented and spectral view of the animal, but one which implicates the humanist constructs that separate us from animality—the car, the camera, the conceptual binary. Paired with the imagery of Road Casualties, there’s a darker irony as well; whatever romantic abyss may be cast between man and animal, it reaches an event horizon in the sudden impact of steel on flesh. “Everywhere animals disappear,” John Berger eulogized, but roadkill resists the notion of absence. On the side of the highway, animals do not disappear — they reappear with overwhelming regularity, not as specters or metaphors, but as real bodies: broken and undeniable. Each collision is not a symbolic erasure, but a violently embodied encounter.

The affective power of Hard Shoulder is a call toward corporeality, presented through the broken mirror of the virtual. Salehi’s work reflects a still-emerging wave of multispecies ethics that aims to dismantle the animal/human binary, restoring the basis of subjectivity and kinship to what Anat Pick calls “shared bodily vulnerability.” In our shared condition of embodiment lies the cure to what Berger described as humankind’s “species loneliness,” and also the route by which humanity’s cascading ecological disturbances will eventually come circling back to us. “In life and death,” Robin Rose Bennett counters, “we are never alone, either as individuals or as a species.”

To look at roadkill is to face double death. This is the harrowing meditation Salehi undertakes in Road Casualties. Her deathwork is mediated by virtuality, not only to shield herself (and us) from a horror that is otherwise unbearable, but to withhold any idealistic appeal. If a dead deer is not seen sentimentally as a symbol, moralistically as a victim, or solipsistically as a mirror—but is instead understood as an index of broken life cycles, then there may yet be room for ourselves in that web of relations as something more than an estranged observer. The first step toward an ethics of proximity and consequence is a simple act of attention.

Catalogue essay commissioned by Fridman Gallery, NYC, on the occasion of Ramakrishnan’s solo presentation at the Singapore Art Fair

What first captivated me in Sahana Ramakrishnan’s paintings was her representation of animals. Some of her works depict animals with humans, while others replace humans with animals. Many more show animals and humans in speculative, hybrid, and fragmentary forms. There is no hierarchy amongst these personae, all of whom      embody consciousness and agency. Ramakrishnan’s body of work comprises a dynamic and mutable “ecology of selves.” This phrase is borrowed from anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, whose book How Forests Think (2013), based on several years of fieldwork with the Runa people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, questions what Kohn terms “our central assumptions about what it means to be human—and thus distinct from all other life forms.” Ramakrishnan’s paintings, too, seed important dreams about the evolution of a multispecies personhood. 

Two house crows look keenly back at us in the portrait One Red Blood (2024). One of them pinches the tail of a dangling pink rat in its beak, and even the poor rodent is possessed of a pitiful charisma. Around the birds’ feet glides a horde of garden snails, each one jewel-like in its detail. Humans are found here too, in the interlocking arms and clasped hands that encircle the edge of the painting. As is often the case with Ramakrishnan’s work, the human form plays a supporting role here, holding together the picture plane for other worthy protagonists.

Crows are part of a distinguished family on the tree of life, the Corvids, a diverse group of birds, also including ravens and magpies, which are found around the world. Social, resourceful, voraciously omnivorous, and very comfortable in urban environments, they possess an intelligence that has always been recognized by humans, who often credit them as “among the smartest non-human animals.” Across deeper scales of time, Corvids are central figures in mythology, often appearing as tricksters who play a pivotal role in bestowing humans with consciousness, or bearing messages across borders between worlds, as heard in story traditions from the Pacific Northwest to the mountains of Nepal.¹

Somewhere between those mytho-geographic poles, in northern Europe, the Germanic deity Óðinn was said to have derived much of his power from an alliance with two ravens, whose vision he could borrow to gather knowledge from distant places and even across time. Óðinn had only one eye of his own, signifying his limited abilities of knowing and perceiving. His omniscience was due to his raven allies, who would fly around the world, returning to him to tell what they had learned. The Old Norse names of these birds, Munin and Hugin, mean “mind” and “memory.”²

As an all-knowing father figure, Óðinn was a clear prototype of the monotheistic God that came to dominate European religion in the age of agriculture, on whose authority Man was ordained the master of all other creatures, dividing the world into rigid domains of human and nonhuman. But the raven consorts Munin and Hugin represent a more complex cosmology, bespeaking a more ancient character. They embody important ecological knowledge, which would be lost in the tide of western humanism: “mind” and “memory” are multi-species affairs.³

Every native story tradition emphasizes the ways thathumans evolved by learning from and relying intimately upon the intelligences of other species. In the worldview of the Piegan Blackfeet, humans are thought to be the only creatures that don’t possess innate supernatural powers, meaning that alliances with more magical beings, like the beaver and the crow, are necessary for obtaining any sacred knowledge. The highest mark of magical power in the Piegan world, as in many traditional societies, is being able to speak with and even transform into one’s animal teacher. Oftentimes this work takes place in dreams. As documented in Kohn’s How Forests Think, the Runa people’s waking and dreaming encounters with animals are important events for understanding inner and outer worlds.⁴

Shape-shifting and talking to animals don’t mesh with a worldview that fundamentally divides the human from the nonhuman, and thus these ideas have long been relegated to the status of superstition and folklore in western culture. But what do we make of them now, as we awaken in the dreaming of a post-humanist age? “Multispecies ethnography” is a term now used to describe an emerging field of western scholarship that recuperates conceptual frameworks for more-than-human cultures. It is a field mostly indebted to knowledge preserved by indigenous teachers and increasingly amplified by postcolonial academics like Kohn, Deborah Bird Rose, David Abram, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Anna Lowhenput Tsing, among others.⁵

Ramakrishnan’s work as an artist is part of this transhistorical shift in consciousness. In her painting Once the World Was Perfect (2024), two lions sleep beside each other under the setting sun, captured in a state of intimate vulnerability. Though this is the largest piece in the artist’s new body of work, it exudes a secret bliss and opulence that recalls Persian miniature painting, an art form designed to be kept in a special album and looked at privately. Beneath the feline sleepers, in the black earth below their bodies—or, more likely, in the symbolic underworld of their dreaming—glides a parade of technicolor snails.

In recent decades, as neuroscience has accumulated great importance in our understanding of mind and personhood, significant resources have been devoted to the investigation of whether or not other animals actually dream. The absurdity of this question is symptomatic of a human culture that believes its own experience of life is fundamentally more complex than that of other species. On the other hand, scientific research is actively unraveling this immodest subjectivity, as evidence of the shared phenomena of consciousness accumulates. Spiders are now observed experiencing rapid eye-movement and leg-twitching while they sleep suspended from silk threads in laboratories. It has been proven that even jellyfish sleep, although they possess no “brain” in the conventional sense. Snails dream, too—or at least, they sleep, and a key purpose of sleep-states as speculated by researchers, even in animals of stable and slow-moving metabolisms like gastropods, is to allow for the integration of memories and waking experiences. This process likely plays a key role in our behavioral evolution.⁶

“Modern” humans have, for the most part, forgotten the significance of dreaming, if not how to dream altogether. But in traditional knowledge systems, dreaming is the principal medium through which to access an extended consciousness. It is also a way to communicate directly with members of other species, for in the shared territory of dreams we are less constrained by the bodily divides that prevent us from understanding one another—including the divide of life and death. Dreaming can manifest a kind of timeless, shapeless mind and memory, shared by an ecology of selves.

And so rediscovering dreaming is inextricably linked to the recovery of multispecies consciousness, meaning that artists have an important role to play in the process. In her studio, Ramakrishnan has a small wire armature of a lion, modeled in paraffin wax. It’s a reference for her painting that is far more practical than observing real lions, and curiously more vital than the undead specimens that could be found in a taxidermy library or zoo. The rough little model is quite alive, animated by her hands and the warmth of heated tools on the wax. For the artist, sculpting, drawing, and painting are means to embody the lion, to touch it, to make it more than an abstraction or a picture in a book, more than an object of the human gaze. Like dreaming, art is a medium for shapeshifting.

Another way of understanding shapeshifting is as an evolutionary process. We have much to learn from other beings; as species go, Homo sapiens is a much younger cousin to the lion, the crow, and the snake, the latter of whom appears in Ramakrishnan’s painting Rains That Open (2024). To say that it is a painting of a snake would merely return to the trap of restricting subjectivity to the human and its closest available analogues. Lest we forget that plants are also dreamers, Helianthus and Alstroemeria flowers obscure and weave around the body of the snake in this work, sheltering her as she begins to shed her skin. Ramakrishnan has painted the plants in a vivid impasto that pushes them forward into fleshy being. A film of the snake’s scales catches on the stems of these green siblings, aiding her in the intimate task known as ecdysis.

I have often thought about how much contact a snake’s body makes with the earth as it undulates through grass and soil and rocks, and how many other organisms it must touch as it moves using the friction of its muscle and skin against the next available surface. Humans locomote on long limbs that elevate the sensorium from the ground, making it possible to imagine one’s self as a pair of floating eyeballs, separate from all other things. For the snake, however, the self/other boundary is but a membrane. Maybe this is part of why they spend so much time motionless; any movement may involve an overload of intimacy.

This speculation runs counter to the modern stereotype that snakes lack emotion, an assumption based on differences in our brain structures. But recent research is dispelling the rumor of the reptile-brain. By measuring the adrenal hormones of rattlesnakes, one study determined that their stress levels drop significantly when entwined with other individuals of their own species, causing variations of “rattlesnakes love to cuddle” to make headlines in 2022. However clinical or clumsy, these revelations rebuild trust in the knowledge that differently-embodied organisms possess diverse forms, but not lesser degrees, of mindfulness. Multispecies consciousness is primarily about recognizing what other life forms have to teach us, and not only those whose intelligence closely resembles our own, like Corvids. The serpent is symbolically linked to mystic knowledge-traditions worldwide, because it is the teacher who can’t escape the knowing that all beings are connected.

But what does it mean to dream of snails, like the lions in Ramakrishnan’s painting? Gastropods are not so widely admired as spiritual teachers. And yet they carry the shape of the galaxy on their backs, and have done so for at least 400 million years. One of the first life forms to leave the sea, they have survived the past five mass extinctions. I’d say a dream of snails is a message about evolution, and a reminder that adaptation is a spiral force. It turns back on itself, ever vital, as we recover and re-imagine our selves. For humans, as the historical arc of separation and uniqueness inevitably leads to our profound loneliness as a species, we are yet called back home.

Notes

1. Raven/Crow appears as the bringer of fire (representing the spark of life/desire/consciousness) in folklore of the Pacific Northwest; for a Haida perspective, see Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst, The Raven Steals the Light, 2nd ed.(University of Washington Press, 1996). Throughout much of Asia, the Crow is revered as an intercessor between the realms of the dead and the living; see the strong associations in Indian and Himalayan visual art between crows and deities associated with death/destruction/rebirth, such as Mahakala, Dhumavati, and Chamundi; in preparation for writing this piece, the artist also told me about the common belief in India that crows are the visiting spirits of deceased relatives.

2. For in-depth exploration of the Norse mythology of Hugin and Munin, see the well-cited research of Dr. Alexander Cummins on his blog QUOTH, in articles such as “Hallowed to Hrafnaguð,” 2023. https://quoth.substack.com/p/hallowed-to-hrafnagu.

3. David Abram suggests that “Mind arises, and dwells, between the body and the earth, and hence is as much an attribute of this leafing world as of our own immodest species.” Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Penguin Random House, 2011), 111.