AMERICAN LIVE STOCK
CalArts, MFA1 Group Exhibition, 2025
-
American Livestock is a kinetic media sculpture that interweaves original CGI, scraped footage, and documentary stills into a constantly morphing tableau. Housed in a plastic kiddie pool atop a stack of Kentucky bluegrass, the work features a hologram fan display that projects morphing sequences—part surveillance feed, part cyber-Reaganite fever dream.
Footage is regenerated and reassembled every 12 hours through a custom recomposition script, generating an evolving portrait of America as stylized memory and fragmented myth.
The installation resurrects suburban iconography as a synthetic dream-state: a lawn manicured into stillness, a fan pulsing like a digital eye, a pool transformed into a portal—looping endlessly through the pixelated remnants of Americana. Resting on exposed shipping pallets, the sculpture frames nostalgia as something unstable and in transit—circulated, consumed, and suspended between storage and display.
By remixing banal imagery into hypnotic loops, the piece asks how national identity is constructed and re-performed inside a culture of endless playback. At once absurd and haunting, Splish Splash drifts between satire and sincerity, nostalgia and dystopia.
American Livestock, 2025
Kiddie pool, holographic display, Kentucky bluegrass, original video + CG animation, scraped and reprocessed web footage, dynamic recomposition script, shipping pallets 3-minute loop (morphs every 12 hours)
