, Afterglow Garden, Mill City Museum Train Shed, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Max Haynes.
, Afterglow Garden, Mill City Museum Train Shed, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Max Haynes.
, Afterglow Garden, Mill City Museum Train Shed, Northern Spark 2016. Photo: Max Haynes.
Afterglow Garden is both a time capsule greenhouse and a fluorescent future wilderness. Image: courtesy the artist.
Inside the time capsule, species from a bygone era are preserved for sensory exploration. Image: courtesy the artist.
What is worth preserving? For whom will it be preserved?
Afterglow Garden is a botanical installation and sensory workshop that highlights a shifting global ecosystem by juxtaposing our climate-present with an imagined climate-future. Step inside Afterglow Garden to travel in time and preserve a bit of the past for an uncertain future.
Glowing from afar, a fluorescent wilderness envelops a mysterious black box marked, “Preserved June 11, 2016.” The box is a greenhouse time capsule that houses herbs, moss, succulents, and flowers from a bygone era which visitors may smell, touch, eat and admire.
Surrounding the capsule, lush plants and fungi grow and glow in the climate of Earth’s tomorrow. The plants are foreign and strange having had to adapt to warmer temperatures, increased CO2 density, and (possibly) the absence of human influence.
Outside the botanical installation, workshops offer participants a chance to contribute to a present day time capsule by using sensory garden plants as prompts for stream-of-conscious “muscle memory” activities.
The results will be published as part of an online time capsule, the Afterglow Garden Anthology.
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<jɑː↓> is an artistic partnership between Allison Osberg and Jordan Olsen, who have formed a creative bond through the exploration of nature, language, philosophy, and social and environmental justice. Their collaborations yield surreal, absurdist, and grotesque pieces reflecting their shared outlook as optimistic realists with a propensity for humanism, zoomorphism, and suspending their disbelief.
Jordan Olsen is a multimedia artist focused on melding abstract aesthetics with utilitarian function.
Allison Osberg is an interdisciplinary performance artist who uses spectacle, participatory and conceptual art to facilitate question asking and wonder making.
Core team members: Bill Olsen, Bethany DeLine, and Catherine Glenn-Stone.
View more photos from Afterglow Garden on the Northern Spark Flickr here!