Faculty of Art

Cross-Disciplinary Art: Life Studies

Sar Wagman

Watch the Land, Watching You

Watch the Land, Watching You is a piece inspired by eco brutalism. Created using a television set with the screen and its insides extracted to be filled with plants, moss, and dirt, it represents eco brutalism at its core; non-organic structures being organically taken over by plant life. Watch the Land, Watching You interrogates the idea of art as a fixed representation of one stage of life, and varying stages of life as the art itself. I take inspiration from when I was in Trinidad, my mother’s country of birth, as part of a permaculture residency and saw many buildings that were abandoned for human use, but beautifully taken over by nature, becoming part of the Earth once again.

“Watch the Land Watching You sees the land thriving instead of dying along with humans in an imagined apocalypse. The resources that we cannot reap or apply human use to are specifically the ones that will survive due to our lack of efforts to suppress them. What cannot be incorporated into the Earth itself will become the Earth’s host.Created using a television set with the screen and its insides extracted to be filled with plants, moss, dirt, and a hydroponic system with blue light to foster plant life, Watch the Land Watching You represents eco brutalism at its core; non-organic structures being organically taken over by plant life. Watch the Land Watching You interrogates the idea of art as a fixed representation of one stage of life, and varying stages of life as the art itself. The mirror at the center creates a contrast; it is a new and untouched mirror among organic materials and broken technology, which is how humans may see ourselves in an apocalyptic situation. Yet, the mirror will eventually become overtaken by the plants, similarly to how we as humans will end up at the end of our lives.”