This iteration of The Party’s Over is an installation exploring light, color, materiality, and meaning-making created for the Spark 2025 Industrial Afterglow show at the Peale Museum in Baltimore, MD. The underlying aesthetic guiding this work is nostalgic, ironically hearkening back to a time when the promise of petroleum-based plastics was seen through a purely optimistic lens. The play of colored light and translucence in my work delivers belatedly on my unmet expectations of a childhood toy, the lite-brite, a back-lit panel on which transparent plastic plugs were placed to create colorful patterns. There is both a personal and a collective theme underlying the installation.Â
The Personal
The theme The Party’s Over emerged following the death of my step-father and my mother’s advancing dementia. What followed were months of work dismantling and disposing of the possessions they had amassed together. The installation created during this time combines bioplastics cast using household items from the house where they lived for 40 years, repurposed as molds. Among these items used as molds include plastic easter eggs, swizzle sticks, cocktail stirrers, and unused containers left behind by home health aides for measuring urine output. The installation incorporates additional salvaged materials, such as serving trays and lampshades, and are displayed on antique tables left unsold following their estate sale. Incorporating both the healthcare supplies they became increasingly dependent upon, and the dusty party supplies leftover from their heyday, inspired the title of this work, the making of which helped me to make sense of the labor of dealing with the massive residue of two human lives.
The Collective
As part of the Spark Post-Industrial Afterglow show, this work is more broadly seen through a collective lens. As we come to grips with the necessity of maintaining our country’s infrastructure, our experience of post-industrial afterglow could also be interpreted as more of a hangover. We are slowly waking up to the consequences of unchecked consumption and linear waste streams, consequences that are not evenly distributed across society. Our collective enlightenment will likely be a forced one, as we experience the effects of aging infrastructure, both physical and social. But I believe, as fundamentally adaptive creatures, we can build what we need with what is at hand. Where possible, I have used repurposed, salvaged materials. While the components of the bioplastic and microcontrollers use raw materials, the bioplastic can be melted down and reformed, and the microcontrollers, sensors, and LEDs will be reused in later installations. The paper elements are composed of deconstructed books from a series of 1960’s Time-Life books on ancient civilizations. The serendipity of finding books devoted to collapsed civilizations in my mother’s garage serves as a reminder that, before things fall apart, adaptation is a choice.