LETTER BOOK
6inx8.5in | unprimed canvas, recycled cardboard, wax-thread, recycled leather, broken belt fragment, enveloppes, backpacking trail map
Letter Book was not created to be an independent art piece. This book was made as a gift to a friend of the artist: a storage vessel for a collection of letters written by his close friends. It was hand-crafted from old, used, and recycled materials that were curated with him and his aesthetic in mind. Twenty envelopes were bound and glued into a cover constructed out of stitched canvas and leather.
RICE PEAK
10ftx6ftx4ft | trash, recycling, wood, cinderblocks
Rice Peak is a sculptural work constructed in collaboration with Tiantian Zhu for Phase II of an environmental art project for the Colorado College (CC) Student Seed Innovation Grant. The work is a culmination of a year-long project to explore the repurposing capabilities of everyday waste and to gain a more comprehensive understanding of waste generation and management on the CC campus.
Rice Peak was displayed in front of the Worner Campus Center on CC's campus for five days: beginning Monday preceding Earth Day 2022 until Earth Day, that Friday. The materials for rice peak were sourced from Colorado College students over about a month-long period at the beginning of Phase I. Only about 90% of the waste donated by 6 students was needed to complete the final piece.
Phase I of this project (not pictured here) consisted of conversations between the artists and various stakeholders in CC's waste management system (local waste contractors Green for Life, the campus's facilities management, the CC Office of Sustainability, students, faculty, and staff). These conversations gave insight into the campus's waste sorting and disposal protocols and practices, and provided opportunities to discuss plans and initiatives to attack their systems' failures and improve sustainability.
Due to a lack of campus studio space and COVID-19 regulations, all of the construction of Rice Peak's took place in Maren's and Taintian's houses. This photo shows Tiantian sitting on Maren's living room floor gluing trash onto wooded framing.
Encroaching is an installation piece made entirely of trash bags and mounted onto the walls and floors of the spare room in my dorm apartment (which was, due to COVID campus closures, also my roommates' and my studio and exhibition space at the time). Each of the six component pieces of this composition was constructed by tying individual trash bags onto one "base" trashbag of the same size until the base trashbag was entirely consumed: no longer visible with no remaining space on which to tie additional bags. The final composition is made up of 6 cells, each sprawling out from one central base. The center point of each cell was designated by the same process that engulfed it. Their organization seeks to mimic the encroaching feeling created in the process of tying these trash bags together.
8.5ftx7.5inx2ft | plastic trash bags