Ghost of a Dream When the Smoke Clears: The Fair Housing Project & Bobby Neel Adams, Momento Mori

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Ghost of a Dream breathes new life into discarded materials once destined for a landfill with their multimedia installation When the Smoke Clears: The Fair Housing Project.  Refuse dug up from the heaps of trash created by art fairs from across the US are reclaimed as building materials to create a small house and other art objects. Surrounding the house, a multi-channel video shows the structure situated by a lake and slowly reveals its unnatural disappearance from its previous location.  Making a comparison to the housing market, the work questions the long-term sustainability of the art market and the wasteful nature of the art fairs’ capitalistic ventures.

Bobby Neel Adams’ ongoing photo series, Memento Mori, pays homage to the many species that have been pushed to the brink of extinction and to their natural habitats left devastated by human progress.  In the tradition of Vanitas paintings, Adams creates delicate compositions using found animal carcasses, dead insects, and flora indigenous to the region. The richly saturated still lifes memorialize these neglected lives and call attention to the rapidly changing and interlocked relationship between nature and human expansion.