2021
Composed of 231 pieces including hand-written short stories, poems, drawings, paintings, and sculptures, Culture Shifted is a visual story about how humanity survived climate collapse and created a livable world based on interconnection. All of the components work together to form a non-linear map of the revolutions that shifted the popular imagination from extraction/consumption to reciprocity/wholeness.
Set ~100 years in the future, Culture Shifted describes a world where the mystical experience is prioritized and ideas like the rights of plants, tree communication, and spiritual relationships with land are considered common knowledge. From small changes in wellness practices to huge scientific discoveries, culture is the driving force behind a movement away from extraction and into a more equitable era.
Culture Shifted was created and installed at Tuo Tuo in Joutsa, Finland.
I am here to tell you the story of my grandmother. She was an artist, a peacebuilder, and an American. She loved revolutions, she loved massive change, she loved books that shook through time and marked the birth of new societies. She loved the shifts that happened over hundreds of years, the shifts that became stories of the past told a trillion different ways by a trillion different people, all in an effort to conjure the present and channel it to the future, in a trillion different ways. She wrote this extensive account of the cultural shifts and revolutions that led to our current era, the Interconnection Age. As we all know, the 20th and 21st centuries were wrought with a devastating imbalance of suffering. These centuries were defined by extraction, fairytales of economic growth, and a devastating trajectory towards total planetary collapse. Young people faced intangible, turbulent, and terrifying futures. The very definitions of labor, wellness, education, healthcare and society were entirely different than the definitions we enjoy today.
As I enter adulthood as a 26yr old, I honor my grandmother’s legacy. When she turned 26 on October 30th, 2021, she lost her health insurance. When she turned 26, the microplastics had moved into the placenta. When she turned 26, racism and patriarchy had their hands deeply intertwined in not only the physical technologies and machines of industry, but also in the rhythms and stories of culture and being. My grandmother was a speck amongst the millions of people who decided to feel deeply in a world that called for numbness and repetition. My grandmother learned from the empaths. She gave herself to ancient wisdom, and she did her best to breathe and march in tandem with all of the millions of healers who lived before and around her. Their story is not linear because the healing was not linear. This is their story.
Culture Shifted
Joutsa, Finland 2021
