Future Present Archeologies
Self-Editing
Gardens of Tomorrow
Eco Anxiety Büro
Some Form of Future Nature
Deluge
Gardens of Some Future
About
CV
Garden of Some Future
Contamination as Collaboration
“As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Back: Resting in Power
Right:Post-Natural Entwinement
Metal, wood, and glass contrast with an industrial and raw nature mediated by a solid amorphous material. Biomorphic tree trunks penetrate oxidized or bent metals and share the violence of cuts and burns. Discrete green, amber, and orange glass adorn these surfaces, appearing like leaks, growths, or sap. Entwined metal pipes move through space, leaking pencil cactus branches and glass spikes. Shapes vary from airy and lanky to stocky.
The brightness of the green wall reverberating onto these provisional works parades nonchalantly across the gallery. This is the backdrop of Garden of Some Future, where contamination is a collaborator. A series of sculptures proposes “renaturing” in a post-anthropocentric reality. Speculative arte-povera for the postdigital age.
We have hit the acid green wall of uncertainty. Contemporary life is fully dependent on synthetic materials made from petrochemicals. The damage caused by human pollution is beyond remediation. Chemicals disposed of in nature are vibrant matter. They leak, leach, evaporate, absorb, and wick right back into water, soil, air, and bodies. Trapped in a mechanism of consumption and disposal, with anxiety and hope, I speculate about mutated landscapes.
In this post-anthropocentric world, there is no hierarchy between the natural and the artificial. The organic is fused and in kinship with the synthetic. Their inevitable entanglement manifests as cyborgian plant entities. Provisional and imperfect, they defy our concept of nature and futurity. They are invitations to speculate on the possible, or on some possible. Their affect ranges from the abject to the endearing and the analog to the digital. Human exceptionality, although imprinted as violence in the materials, is no longer in charge. Nature's collaboration with contaminants, without discrimination, drives world-building for the sake of survival.
We are living in an apocalypse-in-progress. Gardens of Some Future is a rendering of our complex relationship to nature.
Art Center College of Design
Graduate Solo MFA Show
December 2023