“Cossettes” is an immersive multimedia exhibition centered around sugar beet processing across multiple disciplines. Brickman uses the sugar beet as a way to address ecological processes through the poetic materialities of this ubiquitous Michigan crop. Handcrafted paper screens made from beet pulp byproducts are projection screens that juxtapose macro and microscopic video which includes angles of industrial cultivation, harvest, and sucrose extraction methods. An audio component driven by biofeedback sensors generates electronic sugar beet sounds correlating plant metabolism to an abstract sonic environment. A durational performance by the artist donned in a custom suit, paired with a consumable beet-derived food shared with viewers, engages the body. The installation employs sight, sound, taste, smell, and texture to situate the public within working methodologies.
Sugar beets are one of the largest crops in central Michigan and have played a major economic, cultural, and regional role. Since the 1890s, the sugar beet has been cultivated, processed, and fueled economic growth in Michigan. It has also led to deforestation and the drainage of marshlands for new specialized beet fields and roads, which altered natural ecosystems and the rural landscape. Cossettes, the exhibition title, refers to the thin v-shaped slices of sugar beets that get passed through a diffusion tower where the sugar is extracted from the beet. The remaining pulp is often used for animal feed.
Cossettes explores sugar beets as a material using both traditional artmaking approaches and scientific experimentation with a research based practice encorporating field, laboratory, and studio research that culminates in exhibitions. Brickman’s fieldwork includes visits to sugar beet farms and factories to learn more about large-scale farming and beet sugar processing. Her unique laboratory technique distills sugar and records the process microscopically, macroscopically, and aurally. Brickman places sensors on sugar beets to use biofeedback and synthesis to sonify and further manipulate the sound made by the beets. In the studio, the pulp left from the processing is used to make paper sheets that are sewn together to create an installation of screens, onto which the macro/micro experimental video is projected. The Cossettes exhibition, timed around the sugar beet harvest, is a multisensory celebration of both seen and invisible elements of sugar beets.
