Unearthed
2022-present
Unearthed is an ongoing arts-based research project interrogating anthropocentrism, man-made causes of environmental imbalance, and the impacts of climate change on the Earth and its inhabitants. Unearthed focuses on the nexus of technology, consumerism, anthropocentrism, and land politics. My work examines how media and technology influence our social/cultural identities, senses of self, understandings of the world around us, and assumptions about our place in the greater universe. How do our daily screen-based experiences inform (and deform) the ways we relate to the natural world? I’m interested in how “the glitch” exists, beyond its technological context, as a greater existential point-of-inquiry. Unearthed considers deterioration, death, and grief at the monumental scale of mass extinctions and ecological collapse. How do we grapple with loss on such an unfathomable scale, particularly when those losses are at the hands of human activity? I am exploring these themes and questions through a series of multimedia art installations that touch on both broadly universal subject matter as well as topical, locationally specific events.
The initial phase of this project was supported in part by a 2023-2024 Individual Artist Grant from the City of Pasadena.
Topography of Extraction (2022)
assorted car engine oil pans, laboratory spill tray, used engine oil
48” W x 12” H x 24” D
Composed of inverted car engine oil pans rising out of a basin of viscous black oil, this sculptural installation presents like an ominous landscape, reminiscent of the topography of Monument Valley, Arizona—the Navajo Nation. Topography of Extraction serves a critical commentary on persistent myths of the western frontier and the ongoing impacts of mining and fossil fuel extraction on indigenous communities in the American Southwest.
Sacrificing the Many to Save the Many (work-in-progress)
found video footage, discarded plastic train diorama, coal, fire retardant slurry, 1921 copy of Upton Sinclair’s King Coal, iron pyrite or “Fool’s Gold”
48” W x 6” H x 24” D
Pod Protection (work-in-progress)
three-channel video, WeatherPod® Personal Protection Pod
42” W x 58” H x 42” D
Pod Protection is a three-channel video experienced from inside a one-person plastic shield designed by WeatherPod® to protect a single individual from inclement climate conditions. The three-channel video features found footage of Atlantic orca pods attacking boats off the coast of Spain and Portugal, a phenomenon that began in 2020 with over 500 reports since. Scientists are currently theorizing the motivations behind this unusual behavior. The video piece also features newsreels of recent weather abnormalities and their resulting impacts on landscapes and communities, a barrage of recent product advertisements, and drone footage of the North Atlantic Garbage Patch—a man-made “island” of floating garbage estimated to be hundreds of kilometers wide and to contain tens-of-millions of pieces of debris.
This multimedia installation features a plastic “Quarry” train diorama found in a pile of discarded objects at the trash dump in Silverton, Colorado. Accompanying the sculpture is archival media from Wildfire Media's coverage of the 416 and Burro Fires, a 2018 wildfire complex that was started by embers emitted from the Silverton & Durango Narrow Gauge Railroad, a coal-burning steam locomotive in operation 1882–present. The fires burned for over 61 days and destroyed 52,778 acres of wilderness.
Cold Snaps and Rising Seas (2022–2024)
mass-produced plastic bird bath, bird bath de-icer, ice, decomposed granite
documentation of a study for Cold Snaps and Rising Seas:
Studies for Unearthed
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"Plastic rocks" found on Trindade Island in the state of Espirito Santo is seen at the laboratory of the Federal University of Parana in Brazil on March 7, 2023.
photo credit: David Swanson, AFP Via Getty Images
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cell phone photo of laptop screen playing nature video
A Tommy Bahama ad plays before a YouTube video featuring news footage from the January 2022 tsunami that devastated Tonga
“Outside in the sunshine flooded canyon, long lines of cars rolled down with their freight of soft coal—coal which would go to the ends of the earth, to places the miner never heard of, turning the wheels of industry whose products the miner would never see. It would make precious silks for fine ladies. It would cut precious jewels for their adornment. It would carry long trains of softly upholstered cars across deserts and over mountains. It would drive palatial steamships out of wintry tempests into gleaming tropic seas, and the fine ladies in their precious silks and jewels would eat and sleep and laugh and lie at ease and would know no more of the stunted creatures of the dark than the stunted creatures knew of them.”
—from King Coal: A Novel by Upton Sinclair
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“There is no such thing as just ‘landscape.’ The actual landscape is politicized through the events that take place on it. And I don’t think it’s possible for me in general to think about the American landscape without thinking about the colonial history and the colonial violence of that narrative.
What [is] interesting [is] that... both annihilation and then preservation shortly after can exist on the same geographic landscape.”
