Entropic Construction
Steel, Tar, Found aluminum boat, Rope
L16’ W25’ H12’
2020
Earth has entered into a new epoch characterized by humanity’s modification of earth’s environmental systems: the Anthropocene. The rising seas and temperatures, resource scarcity, and climate-change fueled migrations (both human and animal) that mark our new age call on us to reconsider both the ideas that define our worldviews and the material culture that defines the everyday experience. For generations, our society has been rooted in a culture of creation, consumption, and disposal of natural resources. We have extracted and transformed more and more to make “things,” that are meant to improve lives today and for generations to come. This intent inevitably has complicating and even destructive effects. Yet, our culture, and, perhaps, human nature calls on us to find the good in this situation to our detriment.
The installation “Entropic Construction,” is about abstracted dystopian ideas related to the global effects of climate change within the narrative of the rising tides. Because of the obsessive greedy advancement of fossil fuels, and through the continuous cultivation and poisoning of agriculture and maritime systems we have abused and thus rapidly accelerating the changes in our planet and what we hold precious must be raised above us to protect it.
To say the term that a boat is in “The Ways or skid” is where a ship is either undergoing construction, being scrapped, or waiting to be launched. As the waters rise, more land will erode and the earth will flood and will become slipways. The vessels on stilts coated in tar are acting as metaphorical lifeboats, ready and waiting for the tides to rise. The vessels are a representation of the people that will have to use them when they must leave their home town, their state, or continent becoming climate refugees. The tar coating on the stilts must be acknowledged and viewed not as a black matte coating but through its history. As a material of preservation, a material of fuel, and as a material of shame.
