In Shovelfoot, absurdist combinations of office furniture and landscaping tools question the human capacity to helpfully intervene in our surrounding environments and the cycles of growth and violence that form us. The installation grows out of a body of work that explores the tension between feelings of futility and hope against the backdrop of capitalist systems of labor and resource allocation. The artist’s work is partially inspired by their time in human service nonprofits, experiences which have led them to question what pathways towards change are allowed and to dream of ones that could exist in defiance of their limitations.
Shovelfoot brings together video, performance, and sculptural juxtapositions to create a surreal space that references government and non-profit offices. Visitors can hear the sounds of typing as endoscopic footage of soil and roots play on a computer monitor, sitting on top of a desk with a leg subtly transformed into a shovel, stuck into carpet. The movement of the camera through the soil mimics the pathway of organism or mycelium thread, searching for its route. On the wall, a window with vertical blinds obscures a video of the artist attempting to dig a desk into the earth at dusk, as if a dream played on loop, longed for but out of reach.
