Dimensions: 10’ H x 20’ W x 20’ D (dims variable by space)

Audio: Transmitted via a concealed audio system and bass shaker beneath the structure, a low, resonant hum pulses steadily through the installation, the familiar drone of a lawnmower, and a deeper, more bodily vibration. The sound is not only heard but felt, its tremor subtly resonating through the floor.

This ambient drone, persistent but not overpowering, replaces natural quiet with the residue of control. It marks time through repetition, echoing the inescapable rhythms of maintenance, conformity, and erasure. Like the buzz of a fluorescent light or the distant churn of a generator, it becomes both backdrop and presence.

Symbolism: Unnatural Silence is a study of how silence is engineered across land, culture, and national memory. The American landscape is treated not as scenery, but as a system of managed forgetting. Each work presents a redacted image embedded in a sculptural frame made of pressed pulp, clay, or ash, which registers land not as a passive setting, but as an artifact.

Here, silence is not absence; it is infrastructure. Ecological loss and cultural omission converge to preserve the illusion of clarity where conflict, labor, and dissonance once lived. This project works from within those systems, tracing how perception is shaped and history erased—not through spectacle, but through repetition, zoning, and design.

The installation is rooted in the altered terrain of my upbringing on the rural edge of Northeast Florida, where cul-de-sacs, stormwater ponds, and commercial sprawl rapidly overwrote fire-managed pine woods and homesteads. But its scope is national. From Sunbelt subdivisions to the outer boroughs of New York, the same logic unfolds: sprawl replaces ecology, privatization replaces memory, and engineered quiet replaces rhythm.

Constructed from salvaged and scorched materials, charred wood, bark, and fencing, Unnatural Silence engages vernacular Southern forms not as symbols of decay, but as structural residues of erasure. These elements persist not as memory, but as scaffolds of forgetting.

A low, persistent hum undergirds the installation. It mirrors the wider condition: a background noise of control that replaces ecological rhythm with ambient compliance. This is not a lament. It is a reckoning with how American landscapes are constructed to appear empty, and how that emptiness is maintained. Viewers are invited to navigate by texture, vibration, sound, and atmosphere as a physical proposition, intended to work on the body before the mind, asking the viewer to first feel the unease of these layered histories before attempting to decode them.

This project works from the position that the grooming of the American landscape cannot be separated from the social and racial engineering of its communities. The same logic of 'improvement' that razes a forest for a subdivision has historically been used to displace Indigenous, Black, and poor rural populations. The 'unnatural silence' of a manicured suburb is an echo of these deeper, often violent, omissions.

The best art unsettles rather than consoles. Unnatural Silence seeks that register.

Core Concepts: Unnatural Silence is an immersive installation that deconstructs the pastoral ideal, using the quintessentially American sound of a lawnmower—a "pharmakon" (something that acts as both a remedy and a poison, in this case a sound that soothes and oppresses)—to confront the "specter of progress" (the haunting presence of modernization's hidden costs) and the anxieties of a "post-natural" reality (where the line between organic and synthetic is blurred). This installation, a "heterotopia," (a space that disrupts or challenges dominant social norms - like a forgotten homestead within a gallery) disrupts traditional notions of place, employing charred wood, chain-link fencing, and redacted landscape paintings as "traces" (physical remnants or signs of past events), "indexes", and an "anarchive" (a collection of fragmented and disordered memories) to explore the complex interplay of time, memory, and our evolving relationship with the environment. Focusing on the materials themselves, this exhibit invites viewers to contemplate the consequences of our actions, the fractured nature of memory, and the interconnectedness of human and non-human actors within a rhizomatic network (a system of interconnected elements without a central hierarchy like roots spreading and connecting underground), using nostalgic elements not as escapism, but as tools to examine the present.

Pacing and Contrast: The resonant rumble of the lawnmower sound will connect all the spaces, while the paintings and the water room can offer different perspectives on the themes.

Installation: The paintings will be created in advance and shipped directly to the gallery. All additional components, primarily framing and structural elements, will be sourced locally from standard building suppliers. A detailed shopping list and precise cut-list will be provided, allowing the installation to adapt fluidly to a range of gallery spaces and budgets.

To establish continuity across the installation, charred wood elements featured in artworks such as Longleaf and Firebreak will reappear in structural framing, tying the individual works into the broader spatial language of the exhibit. The palette will be grounded in matte blacks, earthy browns, and natural wood tones, with selective accents of green and red drawn from the Trace series and redacted landscape paintings. These restrained variations offer richness without disrupting overall harmony.

The walls of the exhibition space will be painted in a soft, immersive gradient that transitions from a warm ochre at floor level to a pale taupe-gray near the ceiling, echoing the architectural render provided. This gentle vertical shift in tone creates a perceptual ground plane while enhancing the mood of quiet tension within the installation.

Audio equipment, including a concealed subwoofer and tactile transducer, will be discreetly housed beneath the raised platform. This system emits a low, persistent hum that resonates physically through the floor, enhancing the sensory experience without drawing attention to its source.

Paintings will be arranged in varied groupings that shift between different degrees of abstraction, establishing rhythm and internal contrast. Their dark, sculptural frames, made from dark painted papier-mâché, will echo the surrounding materials and help anchor them within the environment. The interplay of blackened framing, painted wall gradients, and raw timber elements will produce a cohesive visual language throughout the exhibition.

The layout remains intentionally flexible, allowing site-responsive adjustments to scale, pacing, and flow. Ambient lighting will be supplied by wall washers or ceiling-mounted light boxes, with an emphasis on accentuating texture, material transitions, and the gradual atmospheric shifts of color and shadow across the space.

Palette Notes: Ochre, charred black, raw umber, soft gray, exposed wood, flashes of red and green.

Shipping and Assembly: The artwork will be created and shipped. All other materials will be sourced locally. A shopping list and assembly instructions will be provided.

Influences: Jacques Derrida's (Deconstruction, Trace, Pharmakon) concept of 'trace' is evident in the charred wood and foraged clay in my Trace series, which act as a palimpsest of the land and physical reminders of past events.

Michel Foucault: (Heterotopia, Discourse, Power/Knowledge)

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: (Rhizome, Assemblage, Becoming)

Rosalind Krauss: (Sculpture in the Expanded Field, The Originality of the Avant-Garde)

Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau

Small paintings: The small landscape paintings reference the grand tradition of 19th-century American landscape painting—artists like Asher B. Durand, Sanford Robinson Gifford, George Inness, and Thomas Moran — who framed the West through the lens of Manifest Destiny. However, these works are not celebrations of that vision but subtly disrupt it. Rainbows and rainy atmospheres that dissolve into their frames introduce a sense of transience and impermanence. The rainbow—often a symbol of promise and renewal—is a marker, hinting at the land's beauty and the historical consequences of its conquest. These paintings will be dispersed throughout the installation, some dissolving into abstraction, while others will be fully rendered, creating a fragmented sense of historical memory within the space. By using beauty as an entry point, these works encourage reflection on what has been lost in the pursuit of the American ideal. The redacted landscapes are used to show the human connection to specific places and times.

Institutional Alignment: Unnatural Silence aligns with institutions that support immersive, material-driven installations exploring land, memory, and the shifting American ideal. Its intersection of painting, sculpture, and sound expands contemporary conversations around landscape and historical mythmaking. Artists such as Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, and Maya Lin have explored similar ideas of land as a site of memory and transformation. The use of found materials and industrial remnants echoes the approaches of Cornelia Parker, Rachel Whiteread, and Theaster Gates, repurposing remnants of destruction into something new and innovative. Sound elements, such as the persistent lawnmower hum, create an immersive psychological space similar to that of Susan Philipsz and Janet Cardiff's work, drawing from both historical and contemporary influences.

Proposed Public Engagement (Optional, Site-Specific):

Sensory Sound Walks: Guided walks around the gallery or nearby green space to explore the ambient soundscape, echoing the exhibition’s focus on the “hum” of progress.

Archival Storytelling Circles: Community sessions where visitors share local or familial stories of environmental or suburban change.

Community Sound Collection Lab: Visitors record ambient sounds or sonic memories to contribute to a living sound archive, forming a foundation for future phases.

Project Evolution: The Three-Phase Trajectory

This project is designed as a multi-phase body of work, evolving across exhibitions and contexts while remaining grounded in its core materials and themes. This project is the first phase of an ongoing series that explores land use, memory, and sonic ecology. Additional phases are in development, with the long-term goal of presenting at multiple venues, publishing critical documentation, and reflections. A small catalog is being considered to accompany Phase II or Phase III, featuring essays, images, and dialogues that surround the work.

Phase I – Unnatural Silence: A sensory core installation confronting the sound of progress, built from charred wood, chain-link fencing, and redacted landscapes.

Phase II – (Yet to be titled): An expanded architectural and sonic response, with interactive installations.

Phase III – (Yet to be titled): A quieter, archival culmination, turning inward to explore memory, echo, and material trace through oral histories, drawings, and poetic artifacts and the natural world.

This trajectory ensures that the work continues to evolve across spaces, audiences, and time without becoming predictable.

Exhibition Requirements & Adaptability: Unnatural Silence is designed for adaptability across venues. The central homestead structure, platform, and water room layout can scale to suit spaces ranging from 1,500 square feet and up.

Ideal ceiling height: 12' + (minimum 10')

20’ x 20’ preferred footprint, but modular components allow for reconfiguration

Sound and light levels are adjustable to suit institutional acoustic and technical standards

Water feature uses a low-voltage pump and is fully self-contained

All core sculptural materials (except paintings and pool) can be locally sourced to reduce shipping costs

Accessibility: The installation is conceived with multisensory engagement in mind. Audio is transmitted not only through speakers but through a tactile bass shaker for those with hearing impairments. The water caustic room provides visual rhythm and calm, and the floor plan flexibility allows for wheelchair access throughout. Large-print guides and alt text for painted works can be provided upon request.

Acknowledgement: Unnatural Silence acknowledges that the land from which its symbolic and material vocabulary is drawn has long been inhabited by Indigenous peoples. I recognize the historical injustices they have faced and the continued complexities of land use, ownership, and stewardship. This acknowledgment is not appended as an afterthought, but forms part of the conceptual foundation of the project: how we inherit, enforce, and overlook structures—geographic, social, and ecological.