SLOW BURN

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My work aims to reorient our relationship to our environment and its histories through films, sculptures and photographs. My current work, Nuclear Family, explores the legacy of nuclear production in New York and highlights its continued effect on our everyday surroundings. My film, Four Minutes, Full Volume, depicts an emergency siren test within the evacuation zone of the recently decommissioned Indian Point Nuclear Energy Plant in Peekskill, NY. Through meditative static scenes of the evacuation zone and the siren’s sound, the film highlights the ambiguity of grappling with the ubiquitous nuclear infrastructure around us. The film embraces the complicated histories of this nuclear power plant as tied to both the destructive legacy of nuclear war and the everyday beauty present at these sites. My sculpture, Background Noise, is a wind chime with steel chimes tuned to 580 Hz, the same frequency as the sirens surrounding the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. The chime also has fishing weights and fishing line, birch plywood, rubber, anti-slip safety tape and an oscillating fan. The sculpture questions the efficacy of government emergency planning through its indoor activation from an oscillating fan with a “natural wind” setting and the allusion to its outdoor activation dependent upon unpredictable wind cycles. Background Noise functions as a natural warning system, and asks us to reconsider if we’re listening to these warnings in a time of increasingly unpredictable climate emergencies such as wildfires, flooding, and extreme heat in New York and elsewhere.