Leftover Landscape
Dimensions Variable, 10-minute loop
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
Presented at the Visual Arts Center in Acceleration Without Arrival
University of Texas, Austin
Photographic Documentation by Alex Boeschenstein
Video Documentation by Britt Moseley and Virginia Montgomery
2024-2025
Through this constellation of rusting metal, living flora, and projected liquid, Leftover Landscape reimagines the gallery as a feedback system between image, matter, and memory. It is a meditation on post-industrial afterlives—how fragments of infrastructure, technology, and waste continue to act, grow, and communicate beyond their intended use. The piece embodies my broader practice’s inquiry into liveness, transformation, and the poetics of systems, where performance and material processes reveal the interdependence of the human and more-than-human world.
Leftover Landscape incorporates live feed projected video, steel sculptures, live plants, printed images, a fish tank, electronics, theatrical lights, and a composed audio score. 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.