ARRIS | a vestige explores care, memory, and the relationship between humans, plants, and place. Inspired by the interstitial space, or the in-between corridor, between The Sculpture Center and Lake View Cemetery, the project brings weeds gathered from East 123rd Street into a constructed environment where sculpture, sound, and projected video respond to visitors’ touch in real time through a collaborative biofeedback system. Referencing the architectural term “arris,” the edge where two surfaces meet, and “vestige,” a trace of what once remained, the project considers the threshold between cultivated and wild, past and future, permanence and decay. By centering weeds, plants often dismissed or removed, the installation questions how ideas of value, belonging, and care are shaped, inviting visitors into a contemplative space that reflects on coexistence, attention, and the layered histories embedded within the landscape.
Celery City is the first in a series of sonic art engagement devices housing plants and a biofeedback sensor that invites people to create collaborative soundscapes through touch, fostering ecology, culture, and history through interactive visual and sonic experiences. A hologram of a celery stalk spins in space atop custom-printed wallpaper with celery cells captured by a digital microscope. The facilitator wears a suit made using the same imagery, made using a historic pattern from the Women's Land Army Era. She cares for the celery, a crop central to Kalamazoo's agricultural history, the tech, and facilitates sonic entanglement with visitors. Biorhythmic Exchange serves multiple intertwined purposes: it functions as an exploratory art intervention that investigates the relationship between humans, technology, and nature within Kalamazoo's urban landscape.