Cover Your Tracks

2018

Installation / Social project (3 karesansui gardens installed on the paths of the Jardí Botànic de Barcelona)

Dimensions variable

Cover Your Tracks is an interactive art installation that was created for an exhibition in the Botanical Gardens of Barcelona and curated by Ignacio Somovilla. The art project was comprised of three Japanese dry gardens located on walking paths throughout the grounds. These framed, shallow gardens blocked the visitors’ intended paths, inviting them to traverse the raked surface of the dry garden and participate in the creation and erasure of marks before continuing with their garden visit. In addition to the natural elements that composed the dry gardens (wood and sand), the artwork employed language and technology in its engagement with the public. This was intended to exemplify the inherent functionality of artworks (mimetic, social and symbolic) while highlighting one of the capacities that distinguishes human beings from other animals, the recognition of representative meaning.

As an artificial construction within a botanical setting, Cover Your Tracks provided an important counterpoint between natural and artificial elements, a condition that every garden and artwork inherently display. Furthermore, through the irrational placement of the karesansui dry gardens within the botanical garden, the project demonstrated the importance of context—both physical and conceptual—in facilitating the generation of artistic meaning, while further alluding to the subversion and indetermination that are inherent to artworks.

Although simple in composition, Cover Your Tracks demonstrated the nature of aesthetic experience by providing a period of time with a marked beginning and an end in which the participant’s focus shift from external to internal reflection. By functioning within an area of uncertainty in relation to institutional context and artistic determination, the installations provided a distinct aesthetic experience for each participant. Used as practical research for my doctorate, it is a reverential examination of the relationships and processes that make art work in such an perplexing and pleasurable way.

Functioning as an allegory of life, Cover Your Tracks promotes the message of neutralizing the footprint that we leave for those who will follow us. While traces of the project could still be found months after it was disassembled, the wood and sand that composed the installations were always intended to be harmoniously integrated back into the Botanical Garden. As the memory of the experience of Cover Your Tracks lingers provisionally in the minds of its participants, the materials that composed it will slowly dissipate into the environment that made it possible.