Dusty Roads and Broken Dreams
In this in-progress multimedia installation, I stage objects like faux plants and rocks with spotlights and speakers playing AI-generated country music, nature sounds, and pre-recorded announcements in a fictional survivalist store. Facades and fantasies of nature sharply contrast with alarming automated announcements alluding to climate disaster and societal breakdown loosely based on the fictional general store Hanning Joss in Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower. In the novel, the heavily armed Hanning Joss serves as a last vestige of normalcy and stability in a world that has fallen into chaos.
I imagine these staged nature scenes as near-future stand-ins for nature in the wake of climate change. Dusty Roads and Broken Dreams is partly inspired by Carl Cheng’s Alternative TV #1 (1974) where Cheng assembles a simulation of nature mixing natural and man-made materials in a television set with changing colored lights. This work also draws on the nature-themed displays at the hunting goods chain, Bass Pro Shops, where nostalgia for an imaginary time and place manifests in a forest simulacrum and merchandise proudly expressing nationalist pro-second Amendment views.
Appropriating modern media like truck commercials and country music videos, I edit out the subjects (trucks and country singers) focusing instead on secondary footage used to enhance narrative and add context to film & video, also known as B-roll. In Country, country music video clips are layered and replayed becoming progressively more pixelated and abstract suggesting cultural breakdown or collapse.
Interactive Fiction & Game
Description: Inside a survivalist superstore, you wander into a portal. Through shifting memory, quiet magic, and unfinished futures, you begin to remake the world and your place in it.
Family Relic (8th Grade) side view, 2025
3D print, 18 x 24 inches
Family Relic (8th Grade) detail, 2025
3D print, 18 x 24 inches
Family Relic (8th Grade) detail, 2025
3D print, 18 x 24 inches
Family Relic (Mother and Baby Brother), 2025
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Family Relic (Mother and Baby Brother), 2025
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Family Relic (Grandparents), 2025
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Family Relic (Grandparents), 2025
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Family Relic (On the Couch with Grandpa), 2025
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Family Relic (Grandpa, Mom, Aunt and Uncles), 2025
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Family Relic (Mother and Baby Brother), 2025
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Family Relic (Mother and Baby Brother) detail, 2025
UV Print on 3D print, 5 x 7 inches
Family Relic (8th Grade), 2025
3D print, 18 x 24 inches