Mattress Factory Exhibits Tra Bouscaren’s Solo Installation ‘Night Blooms’

The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art was the first museum in the world to dedicate itself to installation. The museum holds permanent installations by artists such as Yayoi Kusama and James Turrell. This September 27th, FSU Art Assistant Professor Tra Bouscaren will open a solo installation at the museum called, “Night Blooms.” Bouscaren’s solo installation engages spectacle at the crossroads of waste culture and the surveillance state.

Orphaned objects form the material basis of Bouscaren’s work. His site-responsive process begins with salvaging local materials from the waste stream that bear symbolic, indexical, and poetic resonance with what he identifies as the toxic underbelly of American culture. Aggregating these waste materials into networks of provisional assemblage, he weaves surveillance equipment through the sculpture such that it captures people who approach the work.

The live surveillance feeds are then algorithmically mixed and projected in real time to submerge the sculptural network and surrounding area in an algorithmically generated video bath. The waste-based sculpture is thereby rendered visible through the surveillance capture of the very people who enter the space. The programmed act of projection-mapping live video mashups of viewer-participants back onto the physical structure of the exhibition serves to implicate spectators back into what they have arrived to judge.