Danielle Mericle's The Dark Wood explores broad questions of history and our collective ability to document and learn from the past. Through intertwined images of abandoned Greco-Roman casts, an ancient Sequoia forest and the artist's own texts, Mericle invites us to consider history as a fluid process rather than a static truth.

The once highly valued casts – which appear in the book as original and archival photographs – were rejected as worthless copies during the early part of the 20th century, under the belief that they lacked the artistry and aura of the originals, despite the fact that many of the 'originals' were in fact Roman copies of Greek artefacts. During the two World Wars, many of these 'originals' were damaged or destroyed, and the casts are now considered some of the most authoritative versions available.

Though we attempt to understand and preserve our past, the endeavour is subject to inevitable shifts in knowledge, the whims of ideology, and the vagaries of historical truth. With an epilogue that grounds the complex sequence of images in personal elegy, The Dark Wood re-calibrates our sense of scale by allowing us to locate a sense of mourning, loss and the specifics of our own narratives within the broad and unfixed framework of history.

Danielle Mericle is a photographer and curator based in Eugene, Oregon. Her work ponders the complex relationship between history, knowledge, and power, and has been exhibited at venues such as White Columns, NYC, The Columbus Museum of Art, Georgia, and the International Center for Photography, NYC.