Last years Cooper Union Hometest at the Icehouse

I worked on the home test 2 weeks at the icehouse, I made an installation in the black freezer room, of dead cactus and a lamp made of player piano paper. In the long white freezer room I laid out my projects and made piles of cut up photos and left shredded paper from hollowing out a book and papers with faces of mimes and a fragmented manifesto. Today I'm going to clean it all up.

Based loosely off a segment from
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
by T.s. Elliot

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white

 

In the black room I set up cactus that I collected in Tucson and brought to  Phoenix in my sisters 4runner. The room, a landscape, under the artificial light of memory, represented by the globe, made of player piano paper, almost a codex of memory, that shines light in sharp cuts to the cacti in the room, deprived of all natural light and water and neutrients, the real landscape twists and dies within us, and we pull up bits and pieces of the whole, where the light shines. Photograph Dayvid LeMmon

I found out about this experiment while leafing through a 1958 National Geographic
- radiation experiment with cobalt-60 to test gama rays on plants, cacti among them