Voices from the Hill, 2024. Elephant Hill, El Sereno, Los Angeles, CA
Voices from the Hill was an community-based environmental art project which took place in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of El Sereno. In collaboration with the neighborhood activist group Save Elephant Hill, our goal was help change the narrative surrounding a disputed urban green space currently plagued by illegal dumping and destructive off-roading.
The performance lead visitors through wild and distressed sections of the hillside, and culminated in a regenerated area, highlighting a vision for the future in which a protected Elephant Hill becomes a welcoming place for humans, birds and other wildlife to coexist. The event celebrated the importance of collaboration, whether between humans and nature or among ourselves, in safeguarding a healthy world for all.
Click Here for the web page for the project, which was produced and sponsored by Synchromy, a Los Angeles based composer collective.
Cities into Dust, 2024. The Study, Philadelphia, PA
This curatorial project began as a solo show opportunity which I transformed into a collaboration between myself and three local artists: Amze Emmons, Cindy Stockton Moore, and Erik Ruin. We each explore similar subjects: changing urban landscapes; cycles of entropy, growth, destruction and renewal; and the tension between human and natural forces; and utilize research, direct observation, and speculation to create outcomes that straddle the poetic and the political.
The title of the show, Cities into Dust, is taken from Erik Ruin’s labyrinth book of the same name. Ruin juxtaposes drawings inspired by the 2020 Philadelphia uprisings, the collapse of an historic building and underground art hub in 1973, and excerpts from Hannah Arendt’s the Human Condition. This “vertiginous exploration of urban landscapes in the midst of transformation,” is displayed alongside my reframing of the poem, Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which I subvert Shelley’s Romantic meditation on time and the limits of power by inserting ants which dismantle the text, lending a heightened agency to a seemingly insignificant part of the natural world.
Cindy Stockton Moore’s series Narrowed Plot, “began with a study of a lone tree snag intertwined with a chain link fence on an unmaintained plot of land.” The artist spent two years observing and researching a vacant lot in her Kensington neighborhood as it was transformed by the seasons, the living ecosystem of the site, and the encroaching forces of gentrification. Two of her paintings from this series are shown alongside prints from my series, Obsolete. In Obsolete, I wrestle with the impact of rampant consumerism and waste on the natural world, imagining a future in which raptors nest among obsolete Macintosh computers.
On a small wall, Stockton Moore displays a book of images from this series alongside a cut paper piece by Erik Ruin. While humans’ impact on the landscape is suggested in Stockton Moore’s series, the figure is pointedly absent from this body work. Providing a counterpoint to that absence is Ruin’s cut paper piece in which the scales of the human figure and tree are reversed, yet other formal qualities merge together.
In Amze Emmons’ series, Displacement Architecture, the artist investigates “media depictions of places where communities were displaced by forces outside their control.” He combines references sourced from the media and his own photographs, creating views of the urban landscape which situate the global migration crisis within a personal and local perspective. In my untitled cut paper installation, fencing and e-waste co-mingle and compete for space with invasive flora and fauna. I address notions of “displacement architecture” by comparing human’s encroachment on the landscape with the parasitic behaviors of the cowbird. These “brood parasites” lay their eggs in other birds nests, diminishing the resources for the offspring of less dominant species.
On the final wall, a second print from Emmons’ Displacement Architecture series depicting tents and voting machines in a barren landscape is juxtaposed with a more magical a hopeful gesture: Erik Ruin’s cut paper depiction of hands conjuring sparks.