Student scrap steel, locally gathered weeds, pepto bismol, balls of earthenware clay rolled around on the grounds nearby, transducers, pumps, solenoid, camcorders, projectors, electronics, plant lights, fish tank
Dimensions Variable, 10-minute loop
Presented at the Visual Arts Center in “Acceleration Without Arrival”
MFA Thesis Exhibition at the University of Texas, Austin.
2024-2025
Documentation by Alex Boeschenstein
The installation Leftover Landscape is an artwork that incorporates live feed projected video, steel sculptures, live plants, printed images, a fish tank, electronics, theatrical lights, and a composed audio score. The room glows pink and green. Filling the front two perpendicular walls are projections of otherworldly moving images that resemble the surface of Mars. The images on the wall are sourced from camcorders pointing into a fifteen gallon fish tank glowing bright orange. Orbiting this, are the welded faceted asteroid shapes, made from the student scrap metal. These objects are spotlit with UV Plant lights in order to grow the Pansies and Sow Thistle weeds embedded in their surfaces.
Each sculpture has pieces of metal jutting out from the form. Printed on these shards are downloaded patterns from bus seats and hotel carpets. To me, these carpet patterns resemble microscopic imagery, making the object a diagram, showing details of the surface. The objects are finally wired to the central tank/planet with audio cables, and sing each other "Lessons" in human culture over the ambient score. Unfortunately, they only know fragments, like greeting card songs and computer bootup chimes on Windows 95. It is a comically tragic situation they find themselves in, stranded in this ominous, desert landscape.
I designed an apparatus that manipulates rusting steel in a 15 Gallon Fish tank. The iron
particles and debris are then projected and enlarged onto the walls of the gallery, placing
the viewer inside of the chaos. In order to “puppeteer” the landscape, I engineered an
animatronic apparatus that dispenses globs of Pepto Bismol bubbles, blows bubbles, and
pumps water.