ON COMPOST and Reclaiming the Red-Lining of a City

2013

compost containers (4” x 5” x 2.5”), three videos (2 minute loop, 7’ x 10’ each), mobile map (2.5’ x 5’), mobile cart (1’ x 4’ x 1.5’), red pencils, book (3” x 5”)

Historical Land Art projects were investigations that happened primarily outside the city and involved city dwellers going elsewhere to make marks and engage in the landscape. “On Compost” rethinks these ideas and considers how city dwellers participate in ecologies of their everyday urban context. Compost bins in this project are portable landscapes, sites for drawings of nine Land Art projects that have been documented over one month. Videos documenting the decay of these drawings as worms generate compost are projected in the gallery space.

The audience is then invited to take this compost from the gallery space and distribute it. In exchange participants are invited to re-appropriate the use of a red pencil and mark the city to identify a place they are invested in and intend to nourish with the compost. “Red-lining” has been a discriminatory act of power most often reserved for insurance companies and city planners. In this project, with a mobile cart and mobile map, the invitation is also extended to residents and neighbors within a few blocks’ radius of the gallery. By dispersing the compost, mark-making through planting or nourishing a space is encouraged. A book with land art photos and compost bin drawings shares the bin drawings with their historical references.

sites: compost bins and the neighborhood around Cherokee Street / St. Louis, Missouri

The Luminary / St. Louis, Missouri

NutureArt / Brooklyn, New York