An exploration into the limits of escapism, documented through a postmodern lens. Part documentary, part fictional narrative, Clouds Still Hang explores how we tell our own stories and build  personal mythos. “A fictional feature wrapped around a production documentary: Atwater is a recent graduate with

everything he could ever want, the girl, the job, the life. Yet, he feels trapped. He decides to quit his job, and plot his escape from it all. However, he becomes distracted along the way.”

In 1997, working under the name of his alter-ego Cheri Nevers, Chris Verene began a series of performance art pieces called "Self-Esteem Salons," which sought to create a safe space for people to come and live out a fantasy scene, while performing self-esteem raising actions before the camera. "The Self-Esteem Salon" is a performance artwork wherein artist Chris Verene and his growing family of "group facilitators" build a temporary sanctuary,

to be used in helping strangers—"clients"—to make a sincere and lasting change in their lives. The project is something like a day spa — a short time spent in therapy that will have positive results on your personal life. The piece has ranged from two days to twenty, with the artist living in the space during the show and receiving visitors, clients, and audience members for the duration of the installation.

A competition hosted by Blank Space asked applicants to imagine, through images and text, one’s own architectural fairytale. The Basement of Babel imagines a library housing all the destroyed texts in history, stored beneath the ruins of Breugel’s Babel.

 “The library, said the elder librarian, began
small, though had been greatly expanded by the time the Xianyang library was destroyed by Yu’s troops, and its scholars were buried alive. The basement of Babel, he told Rarbily, stretched deep into the ground, as deep as the Tower of Babel had been tall.

The ruined foundation of the tower marked the entrance to the Basement of Babel, with its halls of books twisting and stretching towards the core of the world.

When the scrolls of Alexandria were incinerated and its walls toppled, all that was obliterated was brought here to be preserved through eternity. Every destroyed work, by action or accident, has contributed to the shelves of the Basement of Babel. Every forgotten text, rotting in its physical record, has been catalogued here. The libraries of Nishapur and Al-Hakkam II are here, destroyed in the name of secularism and ultra-orthodoxy respectively.” 

The Atmospheric Arboretum allows humans to experience and understand the complex and reciprocal relationship between trees and atmosphere, inviting climate into the human “sphere of affect.” Using the pine tree’s natural ability to seed cloud formations, and accelerated by speculated technological advances, the Atmospheric Arboretum generates a new climate in Central Park; a forested, aromatic microclimate at the center of a dense urban island. Research conducted by the European Council for Nuclear Research (CENA) suggests that pines possess the capacity to generate clouds by emitting pinene

molecules–the monoterpene molecule that gives pines their distinct smell–suspending water vapor into clouds. It is well understood that trees are a natural generator of microclimates, but the ability to create extreme climatic conditions through plant technology offers immense possibility for new forms of aesthetic experience in the park. This project engages the existing Pinetum at Central Park, a small patch of pine forest south of the 86th street transverse dedicated to Olmsted and Vaux’s original pine-lined streets that were lost over the last century to deciduous trees.

“A heart-wrenching tale of a banana who will stop at nothing to get to the compost heap.”

An informational PSA about the benefits of composting.