Involucrata, launching in June 2022, will be part experiential public installation, part future history diorama, staged as a window display. Viewed from the inside, it will be a stylized tropical plant filled landscape that is welcoming, safe, and beautiful. From the outside, it is a diorama where the endangered of the Anthropocene era are examined. Window glass will separate our present from a nature-depleted dystopian future.

Involucrata, launching in June 2022, will be part immersive botanical installation, part diorama. The proposed two-week installation, to be situated in an empty storefront in Woonsocket, will be filled with plants ranging from typical house plants to agricultural crops of tropical origin to less common botanical specimens, largely from Central and South America, with a few from South East Asia and Oceania. Inside the exhibit, attendees step into a stylized landscape inspired by the imagined wilds of Henri Rousseau’s The Dream and real, though contrived, spaces like Las Pozas in Xilitla, Mexico, the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. Involucrata is botanical Latin derived from the word ‘involvere”, to wrap. Inside the piece, attendees will feel wrapped in a heightened sense of nature’s embrace, specifically in a refuge away from technology. The goal is to invoke a tropical rainforest, with a “canopy” filled with epiphytes, arching palms, vines, and banana-like trees. I envision a space of calm, welcome, and safety that can fulfill attendees’ emotional need for reconnection with nature.

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Viewed through window glass on the outside however, the piece is a natural history diorama where the endangered of the Anthropocene era are examined. As attendees inevitably pause to take shots for Instagram, they become a tableau vivant of our current and varying feelings about nature and what we stand to lose in the face of climate change and widespread environmental degradation.

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In addition to the external frame of the window, there will be a secondary internal frame made of computer cables reflecting the last 40 years of technology. Their Gigeresque arrangement with mirror the natural vines, while also showing that technology and nature failed to strike a balance.

Inside, thus, is an idealized picturesque present where direct interaction and kinship with nature, whether cultivated or wild, is possible. Outside is a dystopian future where that relationship has been permanently ruptured and turned into a historical artifact.

Learn more about the project:

Involucrata Project Diagrams

Involucrata: Plant Selections (Botanical Considerations)

Involucrata: Plant Moodboard

Funding provided in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and private funders.