Unnatural Silence

If one sound defines America, is it the droning of a lawnmower?

This noise evokes images of orderly suburbia, manicured lawns, cleared pastures, and fenced property lines. This project confronts how the American landscape, particularly in the South, is shaped by violence, erasure, and engineered forgetting. Through installation, sound, and redacted painting, Unnatural Silence examines how whiteness, labor, and land are mythologized in ways that obscure history and enforce silence.

Growing up on the rural edge of Northeast Florida’s suburban enclaves, I became attuned to the sound and pace of change. This work is a meditation on the disorienting transformation of that environment and my community’s way of life.

It encourages viewers to consider what has been smoothed over or left out in familiar landscapes.

Conceptual Framework & Materials

Silence as Infrastructure

Constructed from chain-link fencing, tree bark, and salvaged framing, the installation evokes the dilapidated remains of turn-of-the-century homesteads, prescribed fire-scorched woods, and the relentless advance of suburban sprawl.

A resonant hum emanates from beneath the structure: both the drone of a lawnmower and a metaphor for the destruction and erasure of natural sound. This constant intrusion echoes the inhuman cycle of maintenance and control that defines modernity.

Thesis

Reframes landscape as an apparatus of control, exclusion, and forgetting; not a passive backdrop or a “dead” genre.

The ‘homestead’ structure interrogates the pastoral ideal, embodying the tension between natural beauty and social decay, between organic and synthetic forces, and between memory and the passage of time.

Ties aesthetics to power, showing how “silence” is built, not accidental, and how land becomes a tool of social order.

Questions the American pastoral without veering into irony or caricature, offering a lyrical but unflinching view of how land is manicured, mythologized, and erased.

Critiques whiteness without self-pity, embedding it in material, history, and tone, without relying on slogans or spectacle.

The work reframes silence not as absence, but as enforcement, how zoning laws, racial covenants, and maintenance rituals erase ecological, cultural, and historical presence.

Unnatural Silence posits that silence, especially in suburban, engineered, or ecologically manipulated environments, is not neutral. It explores how landscapes shaped by settler-colonial histories, ecological control, and social erasure generate a quiet that is constructed, enforced, and often violent in its omissions.

Rather than portraying silence as peaceful or meditative, Unnatural Silence interrogates the systems that produce it: zoning codes, aesthetic regulations, suburban conformity, and the repression of sound, mess, and disruption. Through sculptural frames, redacted landscapes, and subtle materials like ash and pressed pulp, the work evokes a landscape where absence is not empty, but overdetermined.

Painting & Material Language

Painting as Trace

The small landscape paintings reference the grand tradition of 19th-century American landscape painting. However, these works are not celebrations of that vision but subtly disrupt it. Rainbows and rainy atmospheres dissolve into frames, introducing transience and impermanence.

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. By using beauty as an entry point, they encourage reflection on what has been lost in the pursuit of the American ideal.

Frames and Surfaces

The frames and surfaces appear weathered and reverent, but carry a quiet violence. Every material is a proxy for exclusion, suppression, and controlled memory. The pressed pulp, clay, and ash register land not as scenery, but as an artifact.

Installation & Design Plan

Installation Design and Layout

• Dimensions: 10’ H x 20’ W x 20’ D (variable)

• Modular components with adaptable footprint

• Charred wood and raw timber in framing

• Wall gradient: warm ochre to taupe-gray

• Ambient lighting to highlight texture and shadow

Audio Strategy

A low hum is transmitted via a subwoofer and bass shaker beneath the platform. The sound resonates through the floor, subtly physical. It mirrors the condition of ambient control, like a fluorescent buzz or generator.

Domestic Traces

A burned pie tin, a scrap of gingham curtain, a shattered or discolored ceramic figurine: these remnants will be embedded discreetly within the installation, They offer a counterpoint to the masculine-coded sonic presence of the lawnmower hum, gesturing instead toward the interior lives and affective labor, often gendered, often erased, that maintained the illusion of order.

Institutional Context & Engagement

Institutional Alignment

This project aligns with institutions supporting material-driven, immersive installations about land, memory, and mythmaking. It resonates with the legacies of Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, Theaster Gates, and Janet Cardiff.

Proposed Public Engagement (Optional)

• Sensory Sound Walks: ambient field recordings near the site

• Archival Story Circles: local histories and community oral sessions

• Sound Lab: visitors contribute to a living archive of ambient sound

Project Evolution

The Three-Phase Trajectory

• Phase I – Unnatural Silence: Core installation (current)

• Phase II – Controlled Burn (Expanded multisensory landscape)

• Phase III – Echo (Drawings, sound and a buzzing sodium vapor street lamp)

This evolution ensures continued growth across venues, formats, and audiences.

Accessibility & Acknowledgement

Accessibility & Technical Flexibility

• Tactile audio (bass shaker) for inclusive engagement

• Floor plan adaptable for wheelchair access

• Large print + alt text available

• Core sculptural elements can be locally sourced to minimize shipping

Land Acknowledgement

This project recognizes that the land informing its vocabulary has long been inhabited by Indigenous peoples. Unnatural Silence is rooted in a critique of inherited structures of erasure—geographic, social, and ecological—and this recognition is foundational to its ethos.

This project emerges from a position of contradiction of being shaped by the very systems it critiques. As a white artist shaped by the contradictions of American land use, I’m acutely aware of how my identity may complicate the reception of work that interrogates land, silence, and systemic erasure. But rather than speaking over others, I’m interested in working from within: exploring how inherited structures of whiteness and control reproduce themselves through aesthetics, maintenance, and myth. The work does not offer a resolution; it insists on unease. If there is any claim here, it is not to moral clarity, but to the responsibility of reckoning materially, historically, and bodily, with the landscapes I come from.