portfolio > Cover the Spread. 2014
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Cover the Spread, Coaster Sequence
The project takes a Rube Goldberg approach to activism, hacking the urban environment through human actions, absurd and insignificant, which enable the distribution of ubiquitous plant life and transform the fractures in the city into micro sites of carbon sequestration and resilience.
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Coaster Car, Potential State
The vehicles function as an idealized and farcical bulwark against apathy as action.
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Installation View
Environmental change in our era is both compounding and massive. Individual agency is diminutive in the now, and yet chaos theory tells us that seemingly insignificant efforts can act as triggers.
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Coaster Car Garden
Indeed, all actions bear some influence upon the constant changes that become the status quo from which further change progresses. This is the contemporaneous undercurrent within which I made this work.
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Crash
As the coaster is activated, speed mimicks wind and the coaster's plants seed the garden below.
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End of the Track
The coaster is a one way proposistion, the system is depleted. Returning the car takes effort and is essentially an act of conservation.
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Exit
The exjhibition garden is made up of 120 plants in modular containers. Choose a vehicle, choose a plant, and take them out for a walk.
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Plant Walking Vehicles
The plants leave the gallery as potential.
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Teardrop Trailer Plant Vehicle
The vehicles have irregular wheels and offset axles to facilitate plant movement while in motion.
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Youngia japonica Garden Detail
Youngia japonica - the plants chosen for this project, utilize wind driven seed dispersal, require little soil or care to thrive, and are able to germinate in marginal habitats.
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Details
Space is precious in the urban city, but the cracks, corners, and edges of human efforts sprout weeds as ephemeral odes to the will of things to persist.
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Asteraceae Seedhead
The shadow garden of the metropolis is opportunistic and temporary, and yet, a substantial alternative ecology can and does subsist on the verge.
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Thermoforming the Planters
The exhibition materials were mostly foraged and repurposed. The acrylic planters were made from scrap framing cutoffs from a previous exhibition at the UH Art Gallery. The plexiglas is cut to size, clamped in a frame/mold and heated. The bubble is extruded with compressed air through the form.
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Acrylic Planters in Steel Stands (detail)
Each stand was built to fit 10 of the planters and is 3' long.
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Staircase Platforms
I had originally built these staircase platforms for another exhibition, and they were repurposed and the design of the coaster was scaled to re-use them