Younger Dryad Swamp Cooler
2016
PVC, foam, PCL plastic, water cooler, London Plane branch, epoxy enamel, twenty-sided die, polished fate, synthetic hair, dry ice
Exhibition
my tree stays tree
Installation views
Works
Empathy Creeps
2016
Acrylic, gesso, rubber, enamel on polyester in mahogany artist’s frame
Birds, flies
2016
Plastic, epoxy clay, carbon, USB flash drive, USB speaker, paracord, 9:48 audio loop
Turning Back
2014
Acrylic, graphite and gesso on canvas
My Tree Stays Tree
2016
Acrylic, gesso on canvas
Untitled (ATM withdrawal)
2016
Acrylic on denim
Untitled (ATM explosive)
2016
Acrylic on denim over linen
Untitled (ATM skimmer)
2016
Acrylic, gesso on linen
my tree stays tree brings together paintings, sculpture, sound, and modified objects in which familiar images and materials become unstable through displacement. Bodies, machines, landscapes, and fragments of narrative remain recognizable without settling into fixed meanings.
The title comes from Sylvia Plath’s On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad, written in 1956 against the background of the Suez Crisis. Its final assertion—“my tree stays tree”—becomes an ambiguous claim for continuity under conditions that have already begun to change.
Three paintings depicting automated teller machines turn an ordinary point of access into scenes of withdrawal, surveillance, obstruction, and potential violence. Elsewhere, Younger Dryad Swamp Cooler combines synthetic materials, a water cooler, a London Plane branch, hair, a twenty-sided die, and dry ice into a provisional figure that is technological, folkloric, comic, and bodily.
Across the exhibition, systems that appear stable—economic, technological, ecological, pictorial—are encountered as their coherence begins to thin. Permanence becomes something closer to persistence: forms and structures continuing even as the conditions that once made them intelligible begin to change.
Read the original exhibition text
Photography courtesy the artist and gallery.