Connecting with Nature

Bring the Rain

Installation Video

WASTELAND from LANDFILL to ARTFILL
JUNE 2007-DECEMBER 2007
Green Horizons at Bates College Museum of Art, ME

Wasteland is an interactive mixed media installation that foretells a possible future of depleted resources  where  one's human strength  is the only means  to power  up illusory worlds. The installation addresses the issues of disposable culture, the objectification of nature, and our propensity to live a life of illusion. Wasteland employs the language of contemporary video art aesthetics both to seduce its visitors and cause them to re-examine  their  roles as participatory members in a world at risk.- Virginia Valdes

MUSEUM CATALOGUE EXCERPT:
Through her multimedia installation Wasteland, Virginia Valdes rubs our collective nose in the absolute mess we’ve been making of our world. By repurposing nonbiodegradable refuse as decoration in a fanciful household interior of the not-so-distant future, she forces us to consider what life will be like when the landscape all around us has been trashed, when not a single space on earth has been left without free of litter and industrial invasion. The walls of her dwelling are decorated with reminders of the glory days of a consumer society, with advertising slogans cheerfully adding nostalgic color to an otherwise dark space. Video monitors glow eerily, showing images of leaves falling from trees, a young woman frolicking in honey-colored autumnal landscapes, the artist communicating with a tree, and harvesting potatoes from her home garden, bedecked in an elegant evening gown. While this image is in humorous opposition to Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters, the joke is serious. She invites us to ponder a world in which the very concept of glamour needs to be rethought–a huge shift in aesthetics that places essential labors like producing food at a much higher level of appreciation than they enjoy today. But the videos are not readily seen. The viewer must be motivated to power the monitors by mounting a pedal generator. Valdes’s insinuation that electricity is only to be had by those willing to make it themselves is clever, as it suggests that breakdowns in power structures larger than just the electrical grid are imminent. Consumerism careering forward at ever-increasing rates is the largest of supports propping up our economic and political systems. The future envisioned by Valdes is one in which that consumer economy has collapsed under its own weight, leaving only an endless wasted world in its wake. - A.Shostak

 

Artist Statement
Abundant and cheap energy is what fuels overpopulation and sprawl. Consider a place where one can no longer send their waste to a dump or count on the prosthetic aides of industrial civilization but must find ways to accommodate his trash within his own personal habitat. Paving, urban sprawl, and overdevelopment have exhausted our resources to the point where our own human strength is the only energy available to power up what remains of our virtual worlds.

Wasteland attempts to show how a human habitat filled with non-recyclable and non-degradable material goods not only inexorably eliminates others and ultimately all life, but increases the artificial and cultural divide between humans and their biological environment.

THE INSTALLATION
Take a Ride into the future: A motion sensor detects museum goers as they pass an arched entranceway. Upon enterring, a woman’s voice is heard welcoming viewers to Wasteland, an environment devoid of biological life where at its center heteroclite objects protrude from a large heap of candy colored plastic garbage.

A stationary bicycle sits directly in front of the large heap facing four black screened monitors stuck inside the landfill. The viewer/participant must sit on the bike and start pedaling in order to power up the monitors and virtually connect with nature.

As the viewer begins pedaling a loop of seven videos play each touching upon the relationships we create with our natural environment in a variety of ways ranging from a sultry invitation to get in touch with mother nature to a psychotic women dressed in a pink and gold sequenced gown digging up her potatoes in a celebratory frenzy.

To the right of the bicycle a sign reads "do not exceed 12 volts or you will fry the system and lose your illusory connection to nature”. A red strobe-light flashes while a piercing siren goes off warning the bicyclist they are about to exceed recommended voltage and must slow down their pace.

Once the viewer stops pedaling the video images disappear and we are left once again looking at a pile of junk/art in the corner of the room. There is a balance the bicyclist must reach in the speed and strength of his pedaling in order to keep the system operating and playing scenes of nature without actually shorting and burning out all the monitors.