How Feral Carolina Dogs Marshaled a Defense Against Nuclear Weapons

Who was the first person to domesticate dogs, to dare to bring a wolf into their cave and tame it? “They could grow up to eat your children,” reminds a mustachioed man posing these and other canine questions in Erin Johnson’s two-channel film Heavy Water (2018).

Then, the film cuts to show our protagonist’s hand hovering in front of a slide projector displaying a plot of cheap land in South Carolina where nuclear weapons were developed during the Cold War. You might start to wonder where the film is going. Then, it comes full circle, our apocalyptic future mingling with our ancient past.

Ecologists like L. Lehr Brisbin, the man onscreen, noticed “unusual dogs with strange behavior” inhabiting this South Carolina lot in the 1970s. They were “gingerish” and Dingo-like, feral, rare—our species domesticated dogs long ago, and we’ve coevolved together for ages. Brisbin says these Carolina Dogs, a rare breed, have no European DNA, and that he started noticing their likeness in cave paintings—that maybe, they’ve been in the Carolinas for thousands of years. After environmentalists advocated for protecting these unique creatures, the nuclear-weapons manufacturing on their site was halted. Then, scientists found several federally endangered species (birds and plants) thriving in this area that humans cordoned off.

Heavy Water is on view in Erin Johnson’s survey at the University of Georgia’s Atheneum in Athens, and like so many of the other works on view, it is something like an essay film—yet one that does not didactically demystify the world, but rather renders it sensorial and strange. Often, Johnson makes films about our interactions with other species, filming scientists (an oceanographer in 2022’s To Be Sound Is To Be Solid, and a botanist in 2026’s The Ferns), or else animals (monkeys in 2024’s Cayo Santiago) and the humans who interact with them (Georgia’s local legend, “the goat man,” in 2014’s If it Won’t Hold Water, It Surely Won’t Hold a Goat). But the cold, analytical qualities typical of both science and documentary film give way to something tender and embodied in Johnson’s hands.

The title of the show, “The Measure Is Something Else,” comes from a letter Rachel Carson wrote to her lover, Dorothy Freeman, while dying of cancer. The topic at hand was monarch migration. Carson observed that the butterflies’ lifespan seemed short, but understood that the measure is something else from their perspective.

A voice-over reads more from Carson’s letters in There Are Things in This World that Are Yet to Be Named (2020), the film unfolding in sonic textures of the kind so much heady research-based art misses. Lines from the letters are chanted almost musically, repeating the refrain “there are so many things yet to be named” until its enthusiastic sense of wonder radiates. Meanwhile, botanists in a greenhouse reflect on the ways binary (and unscientific) thinking about gender brought its unhelpful bias into plant classifications, occluding our ability to understand the more marvelous ways they reproduce. Their lab’s research on a certain bush tomato exploded understandings of sexual normativity.

The exhibition embodies ecosystemic thinking as much as it is “about” it. Such thinking posits that everything depends on and is connected to everything else, and there is no art form that relies on interdependence more than film. When Johnson’s credits roll, it’s a veritable list of art stars: Catch contributions by Nikita Gale, Farah Al Qasimi, Sondra Perry. Filmmaking takes a village, and Johnson relies on friends.

Johnson trained at the alternative Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina—where students farm the food, manage the land, and more. She also directs an artist-run space in New York named Winnie, after her dog, and does dog-rescuing work, too—organizing and collaborating in art and in life. This ethos is made most visible in Tomatoes (2020) and Oranges (2023), where friends from the credits and more appear onscreen. A camera scans her Skowhegan cohort seated in a circle as they eat, in one video, tomatoes in a field; in another, oranges on a roof. You’re left watching people (Tomashi Jackson, Annika Todd, Chase Hall) just eating, and it feels surprisingly intimate, both sensual and silly as they slurp juices and spheres.

Thematically, too, interconnectedness abounds. Juxtapositions of seemingly unlike topics (plants and gender, feral dogs and nuclear weapons) give way to Venn diagrams, with Johnson dwelling in their overlapping middles. In To Be Sound Is To Be Solid (2022), we watch the artist talk on the phone to a scientist whose work involves mapping the bottom of the ocean floor. Meanwhile, Johnson imagines the lives of the two women who built the Sea Ranch house she is renting—a midcentury marvel with fresh flowers, crisp bedding, and sleek bistro chairs. She finds hints that these women were a couple: They drafted, for instance, one version of the floor plan with just a single bedroom to share. Queer history can be like the ocean floor in that way: As the scientist relays, since hard data is too hard to come by, the best you can do is average the depth of an area around 200 meters by 200 meters.

Johnson’s is that rare, rich breed of research-based art that lets you marvel at how big and strange the world is—at how deep the ocean might be—enlisting science not to close down the mystery, but to open it wider.