If We Aren't Dust yet; Then What are We?
These sculptures live in a stasis of grief, conflict and powerlessness amidst an ongoing dilemma of our duties to one another and ourselves.
In an era of impending climatic disaster, a rise of authoritarianism across the globe, persisting white supremacist and colonialist values, and the stripping of rights from US citizens and non-citizens alike; It is easy to feel that there is no place to look as to not have our hope and faith tested. So commonly our cellphones provide a forum for an unprecedented awareness of the suffering of others. A cause for fierce and detached anger, as well as a deep and apathetic forgetting. All the while collecting information to further direct us away from ourselves and each other.
How are we to deal with such literal and existential crises? How are we to cope knowing as much as we do, and yet being made to feel so powerless?
The materiality of the figures intends to pose a question, if one of them is to disintegrate away, will they have truly left nothing behind? And if we are to pose such a question as that, does that not already imply that such a presumptive dissolution has in fact not yet happened?
WHAT TO TAKE WITH US
The gallery Installation places spectators amongst individuals in the midst of climate related disaster and collapse. These encounters range from voyeuristic, confrontational, intimate, and introspective. Depictions include scenarios of migration, mourning, isolation, Violence, and Dispute over resources. So frequently the realities and depictions of climate change and climate disaster in their varying forms feel distant and apocalyptic in ways difficult to internalize as a reality. The aim of this work is to directly involve spectators in these narratives so to help personalize the implications and consequences of our current trajectory.
The work later progressed into a practice of introducing these figures into the outside world, as a means of experimenting with how the setting may inform our interpretation and experience of them. The intention of unexpected encounters with them, in addition to more honest world scenarios has proven to be very important in the development of the work.
RESIDENCE
This Installation reflects my thinking about our sense of humanity and the emotional experience of existing in a world in which we may not be able to exercise empathetic action. The scenarios I am anticipating are based in projections of environmental and resource infrastructure collapse for our near future. Major themes explored include diminishing resources, forced migrations, and political upheaval. Furthermore, I have explored the emotionality associated with these through imagery and language suggesting loneliness, hardship, isolation and confrontation between the self and the Other. Some motifs employed are generalized figures, collapsing or confusing landscapes, violence, migration, desperation, and guilt.
This project is very much rooted in my personal fears of the future and the conditions that it holds. Because of this, i view this series as an intersection between world building and predictive storytelling. Thus making the installation a sort of caricaturization of my own anxieties and future self.
