Serena JV Elston

Summer 2024 Issue

SPACORE Collective is excited to share our inaugural publication in the style of a high-end waiting room magazine.

You can order a copy at www.spacore.skin

Table of Contents

7. Curatorial Statement

11. Wellness Quiz by Matt Bodett

15. Employee Family

19. What is SPACORE?

21. WAITING by Zoya Brumberg-Kraus

23. Work/Life Balance Questionnaire

29. DEATH by Marne Lucas

35. BEAUTY by Vince Phan

39. SWEAT FOR ME feat. Skynsuit photographed by Aaron Morgenstein

47. CARE by Nour Ballout

55. Care-orist Scheme by Florence Woolley & Phoebe Beckett Chingono

57. The Limits of Self-Care by Mike Ervin

65. Art + Leisure by Lisa Wainwright

81. Letter to Gwyneth

83. About the Curators

2023

46 x 38 x 6 inches

Synthetic bone, plywood

The body is portioned into two substances, flesh that rots, and bone that lingers. Bone becomes a metaphorical material for resting death in attempts for immortality. The portrait is an embodiment of a hero image. This work references Ernest Becker’s book Denial of Death where the Hero becomes a stand-in for symbolic immortality. This theory illustrates how implicit ideologies of power are embedded within the constructions of institutions. The portrait hangs surveillancing the exhibition space from a frame that appears embedded within the wall. The bone appears as if exposed from the facade of the institution. This work is part of a series of wall works including landscapes cast from the same synthetic bone material.

A Devil and a Witch Make a Nail, is a dramatic duo exhibition featuring the works of artists Vince Phan and Serena JV Elston. The title of the show draws inspiration from a 1700s woodcut, a relic that encapsulates the mystical collaboration between human and supernatural forces, crafting objects that defy the natural course of growth.

In his seminal work, "The Denial Of Death," cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker delves into the creation of such metaphorical objects, uncovering their existence within the tangible symbols of ideologies and relics. Within the realm of this exhibition, Vince and Serena embark on an exploration of this concept through the malleable nature of materials, traversing the boundaries between the organic, synthetic, and inanimate.

This artistic dialogue manifests as a dialectic, a dance between ephemerality and permanence, where the artists manipulate materials to breathe life into symbolic representations of immortality. The interplay between the biological and the inanimate serves as both the form and material, unveiling a profound exploration of content and object. The resulting structures become symbols of immortality, urging viewers to ponder questions of change that manifest on both a biological and political level.

2023

48 x 48 x 10 inches

Mushroom of immortality in bronze, reishi tea, plywood, steel

The fruiting body of the reishi mushroom is charcoaled and destroyed in the process of transmuting its flesh into bronze. Here the bronze bodies are bathed in tea from their former flesh causing a catalyst reaction resulting in the formation of spore-like coloration. A freshly brewed tea from the same species is served to viewers. What type of mushroom would an art museum collect? A bronze mushroom that mimics life but is not life itself.

Reishi gained its colloquial name, the mushroom of immortality, from its use in imperial China’s elixir of immortality that was consumed by the emperor to prepare the body to ascend to the plain of immortality. The elixir also included lead and arsenic with the understanding that the body must die to achieve eternity.

2021

24 x 48 x 16 in

Copper belly, electric hot plate, extension cord

Durational

The work is a domed belly hung at waist height with an aestheticized electric hot plate that glows red at 1100 degrees. The copper is stained with the fingerprints of the fabricators humanizing the metal. The extension cord connecting it to the wall is its umbilical cord. This sculpture is a contemporary re-telling of the mythological origin of hunger in the formation of humans from an immortal source. In which digestion is the application of time on the body and is the direct cause of our obsession with immortality.

2023

Toilet paper, urea, synthetic bone, touchless dispensers

28 x 28 x 64 inches

Fountain Of Youth is a figurative monument to aging rather than a petrification of youth. The mythological spring was said to restore youth to the body. How does the disabled body react to these magical waters? Subverting the symbol of forever-lasting, here the fountain is made of toilet paper, Urea- a synthetic urine and synthetic bone, developed by the artist. Viewers activate the dispensers releasing water onto the crystalized toilet paper. This immediately dissolved the Urea crystals which re-grow when dry.

Laboratory of Material Slippage is and artist duo comprised of Serena JV Elston and Vince Phan.

For more information:

https://www.labratoryofmaterialslippage.org/

Chthonic Coil, 2023

Former water main of the Art Institute of Chicago, copper oxide and other corrosions, ceramic

Chthonic Coil was formed from the corruptions of copper oxides and mineral deposits found within the severed sections of the former water main of the Art Institute of Chicago. These material’s geologic origins are reconstituted as a glaze applied to the ceramic pedestal.

Abjecting MCM is a furniture-like sculpture grown from native Red Reishi mushrooms. This work locates Mid-Century Modern Design as a tool in the invention of whiteness as a modern American ideology and reveals its grotesque history. The production of the work as a biological piece illuminates this idea as an ideology and not a truth, an anti-monument, an effigy. The mushroom subverts this history and cross-pollinates with local fungal bodies, helping develop more genetic diversity in the subterrain microbiome. Abjecting is the mycological term for the release of spores by a fungus; and the shock when what was once hidden all around us is revealed.

2023

Water, bacteria from the gallery’s previous flood damage, buckets

This work locates the water within the infrastructure of the space in the gallery and reveals the history of flooding on this site. The buckets are located under exposed water piping junctions in the ceiling. The two buckets echo the sound of drips slowly collecting in them.

2023

Mushroom cultivated from the Chicago parks system

50 x 30 x 30 inches

Resurrected Caryatid is a living mushroom with a headless gaze engaging the viewers in a stance of soft power. Caryatids are a feature of neoclassical architecture where a female body carved of stone stands supporting the walls of the building. Here her body is in repose sitting on a base of soil. Throughout the exhibition of this work, her body as the mushroom myceliates, growing into the base. Her act of rest is a protest of institutional exclusion and the myceliation is a demand for entry. The expansion of the mushroom into the larger building will cause failure to its structural system. She confesses to all bodies that they are contaminants in the institution and they contain all the elements necessary to cause complete collapse.

Special Thanks to Windy City Mushrooms.

SPACORE is an artist-run curatorial project that produces ambitious group art exhibitions, performance events, and publications that interrogate wellness capitalism in the midst of global illness. Central to this mission is the promotion and support of artists with disabilities and chronic illness, particularly women, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ creators. Our mission is to present critique, platform important voices, and spark urgent discourse on the condition of working class health.

SPACORE is in all caps because it is the sound of your boss yelling at you.

Curatorial Statement:

SPACORE is a satire of the ethics and aesthetics of the labor of wellness. SPACORE explores the neoliberal attempts to pacify the working class with the promotion of superficial “wellness.” This version of wellness co-opts the language of radical self-care and redefines it as access to upper-class amenities regarded as luxury. Wellness culture derives its “authenticity” through culturally appropriative aesthetics that Orientalize and steal from non-Western cultures. Wellness is a colonial project designed to locate suffering within the individual in order to repress political revolt. SPACORE situates wellness in the horror genre, where it belongs.

WHAT IS SPACORE?

Wellness is the new horror: corporate retreats to meditate; mandatory self-care; Uber drivers sleeping in their cars; Amazon Zen Boxes; 24-hour Twitch streams; masturbating on OnlyFans; inspirational quotes for overworked employees; hotel sauna between conference presentations; pandemic work Zoom calls with no pants; work from home while sick; casual Fridays; going home early after work-related injury; coffee run on a double shift; pizza for working after hours with no pay; vaping in the bathroom; texting at the cash register; treadmill desks; birthday cake in the breakroom; employee discounts on mindfulness apps; tanning salon on lunch break; spa rewards for sales numbers; relaxation as work. Wellness culture is indistinguishable from labor. SPACORE is the integration of spa aesthetics into the horror genre. It is mascara running down cheeks in a hot tub, a panic attack during a massage, nightmares about being late for work. SPACORE is blood-red splattered over muted pastels of sea-green and sandy-beige. It’s a new age amethyst crystal jammed in an eye socket, a neatly rolled white towel held over a mouth to muffle a scream, the smell of flesh burning from hot stones, and a face mask that peels skin from skull. SPACORE is the sound of trickling water on rocks and soft guitar pitched down with screams overtop. It's a list of amenities in Creepsville font. It’s a lazy Sunday-scaries: seaweed face wrap while fantasizing about killing your boss. SPACORE is the zen of drowning yourself in a mud bath. SPACORE is Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat: murdered while working from home in the bathtub. SPACORE IS LUXURY LABOR-TO-DEATH.

Jubilee

2021

51 inches x 51 inches x 1 megalithic yard

Deodar Cedar

Jubilee is a ritual object created to confront the ethos that we are all born into an infinite cycle of debt to our parents, society, culture, country, etc... Inverting the pyramid into a funnel subverts this most ancient symbol. Rather than reaching to the sky for eternal life, the point drives downwards into the earth, acting instead as a collection point for debts that no longer serve us. Inborn debt is a moral issue, not a financial one. Being born into a world of predefined options gives an illusion of choice. Jubilee suggests liberating ourselves from this cyclical progression by asking for the freedom of self-definition.

This work was made during Serena’s Artist in Residence at TSA LA February - March 2021

2023

Mushroom, Steel

This sculpture grown from mushrooms is modeled from the mid-century modern iconic Eames Chair. Rather than a foot ottoman the piece offers gynecological stirrups. This work is from a series of furniture designed for SPACORE, a curatorial platform for the lived experiences under wellness capitalism and situates wellness in the horror genre, where it belongs.

The mushroom, a chair and a body on display speaking to the objectification of the female body as ornamentation in Modern design. The metabolites leak from the body of the living mushroom and pool at the back of the chair discoloring the work with a ‘wet-spot’. The slimy liquid challenges the viewer to sit in the chair and become the ornament.

2023

The series of queer coporeal sculptures grown from edible fungi transforms the representational to the abstract over the life cycle of the sculptures as they become sexually mature, flushing with fruiting bodies of mushrooms.

This group show under the same name took place at Heaven Gallery in Wicker Park, IL with art from Mack Baker, and Isabella Mellado, Lauren Oberlin, and Serena JV Elston.

Special Thanks to Windy City Mushrooms.

2020

Single Channel Video with Audio 1:58:00

Oak gall ink, gelatin, oak, willow, waxed Linen, cotton

In Horn of Plenty, an obsidian ooze emits from the open orifice of a traditional cornucopia. I wove this horn from willow shoots and cotton cord and filled its inside with cast gelatin, catalyzed with oak gall ink. Made with tannic acid, the white blood cells of oak trees, and rust, this black pigment dates back to Ancient Rome. The resulting concoction smells of blood and bone. The Magna Carta and the American Declaration of Independence are just two of the many documents inscribed with this ink.

The cornucopia’s iconic shape comes from a Greek myth in which the adolescent Zeus rips the horn off the head of his nursemaid, a goat nymph named Amathea. The theft robs her of her power but provides her godly assailant with a source of limitless abundance. When he takes Amathea’s horn, Zeus severs the means of production from her body – from the feminine, from the Earth. Untethered to the limitations of the body, the horn seems to endlessly reproduce wealth and nourishment.

But in my recasting of Cornucopianism, this naturalistic gateway to abundance merely beguiles man with the mirage of plenty. When women create life, they are simply mothers. When men create life, they are called gods. In a modern context, Cornucopianism maintains that technology and economics will inevitably find solutions to the problem of finite resources. Science will allow us to make more from less. Limits to growth are anathema. When a resource is depleted conquest becomes the next step to feed society’s unending hunger for more. There is no concern for ecological cycles while the economy must be maintained. Here, in a sardonic act of revenge, the horn of plenty reveals itself as finite. Its contents diminish, forcing one to reach ever deeper into the severed appendage, only to grasp in vain at the dwindling remains.

Photos and Director of Photography by: Carter Grimes

First Assistant and Lighting by: Nick Gerads

Music by: Christopher Rose and Masha Mitkov

2019 - 2021

00:30:00

Live Performance

MUSIC . LIBATIONS . CURSES . PROPHECY

Apotheosis was the first of several live theater events performed on Siren Island. The event was coordinated with a local sailing group, the Washed Up Yacht Club. Approximately 50 vessels attended by tieing up to each other in the round. Using classical Greek theater themes and characters, the performance offered a satirical and critical conversation of neoclassical revival as a indicator of facism.

An excerpt from Hermes’ monologue

“I am not immoral, I am amoral. I know not good or evil but I am responsible for both. They call me the trickster god, but I think con man is a better contemporary term for my work. Whether you know my name or not, you know my work. Capitalism! Heard of it? What better system exists to steal wealth from thy neighbor? Yes, American Capitalism. I’m talking to you. And if by ‘America’ we mean the land of rootless wanders & free market, the land not of natives but of immigrants, the land of opportunity and, therefore, opportunist, the land where individuals are allowed even encouraged to act without regard for community…. Yes, America, you were never immune to my tricks. I wrote your cultural manuscript and America is my apotheosis, and I am pandemic.”

Written by Serena JV Elston

Performed by: Masha Mitkov, Simon Lion, Sean MacCabe, and Ethan Fister, Nicolas Cristo, and Serena JV Elston.

Photo by Carter Grimes

2021

Shiitake (Lentinula edodes)

Pink and Yellow Oyster Mushrooms (Pleurotus djamor & citrinopileatus)

Lion’s Mane Mushroom (Hericium erinaceus)

Oread is one of several sculptures from a solo show, also called Fruitful Bodies, that opened in January 2021. This show further delineates the work I began in 2019 by pairing species of mushroom with distinct qualities to members of the pantheon of Greek nymphs. Oread, the nymph spirit of mountains and stones, is grown with Shiitake mushroom because of the fungus’ rock-like look. Mycelial expansion into hyphal knots creates the texture of flesh turning to stone. From the hyphal knots, fruiting bodies of the Shiitake form into flushes of the iconic mushroom shape. Pegaeae, the nymph spirit of a fresh-water spring, is grown with Lion’s Mane mushroom, characteristic for its long spines, mimicking the form of a waterfall. Dryad, the spirit of an oak tree, is grown with Yellow and Pink Oyster mushrooms. Oyster mushrooms grow in symbiosis with trees, giving off a burst of color amid the trees’ bark and later decomposing into forest topsoil.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, we will stream a live timelapse of the growth and decay of the mushroom sculptures.

2022

12 x 12 x 20 inches

Bronze, Stone

The Sirens are simultaneously mythological creatures and a place, a boundary water, a border of the possible, a threshold. The half bird half human beings are considered monsters because they threaten the social order. The Sirens are a kind of mythical fantasy accompanying the formation of a male self, of a patriarchal order and serves as a collective male fantasy concerning the life-threatening, anti-civilizing power of female sexuality. This fear of loss of control is harnessed by the Siren body; A return to animality, a hybrid of bird and human, they reject culture and are an accordance of nature. Their nudity reveals the animal underneath the civilized human. They hint at an escapist fantasy to leave the domestic and fly untethered into the wilderness. Their pleasures exist outside of domination and the masculine need to assert and reinforce difference. Their voice is weaponized erotics that upon penetration of the listener, only desire can exist. This whelming permeates the self, rendering the body helplessly aroused and drawn towards the sound. All faculties of agency, reason, ethics, and law are non-existent in their presence. The Siren’s song dissolves systems of power, revealing the porous nature of the self and its ultimate vulnerability.

2018 - Present

28 x 24 x 10 feet

Siren Island Curatorial Statement 

What might the embodied experience be of a place untainted by patriarchy? This question inspired Siren Island, an interactive marine structure and performance series. Drawing on speculative and material strategies, the project invokes the ancient myth of the Sirens to explore themes of desire, the untamable feminine body, and the liberatory act of un-civilizing. Existing as a sovereign space apart from land and its attendant systems of power, Siren Island imagines a location where bodies can detox, find relief from oppression, and reconnect with primal states of being. 

Siren Island is a platform for re-contextualizing mythology. Designed to mimic an undulating rock rising from the sea, this floating, immersive structure is launched and anchored at various locations, inviting discovery. To reach it, the audience must venture into the water, leaving behind the possessions and technologies that tether them to the land. The approach becomes a ritual quest, a feral baptism that immerses the body into a state of restorative animality. Across cultures, the ocean is often seen as a realm of chaos—a primordial space home to serpents, leviathans, and deep mysteries. Submerging oneself en route to Siren Island invokes a return to an embryonic state, a time before societal constraints shaped desire.

As the central figure in Siren Island, Sirens are featured throughout the performances and serve as a pivotal reference point. Sirens are simultaneously beings and a metaphorical place, a border of the possible, a threshold that dissolves constructs . They embody hybridity—a mix of bird and human—that destabilizes categories, challenging the structures of identity and order. Their exposed, animalistic form strips away civility, revealing the untamed feminine sublime. The Siren is a figure of polymorphic perversion, offering an escapist fantasy of unbounded wilderness and freedom. 

Project History 

First launched in July 2018, Siren Island was conceived and designed by Serena JV Elston and constructed with the help of a team of seven fabricators. Functioning as both a movable landmass and a plinth-like performance stage, the structure has hosted four major activations

between 2018 and 2021. Each activation, lasting from two to ten days, featured around 150 participating artists and an array of public programs. These included absurdist spa-like experiences such as “Bath in the Blood of Your Vanquished Enemies” and “Preferential Treatment,” where participants were whipped with roses by naked performers while they screamed, blurring the line between spectacle and ritual. 

The first activation, Drowning Woman (2018), was an original play written by Serena JV Elston and Simone Lion that depicted capitalism as a mythic curse of eternal damnation. In 2019, Landlubbers followed as a participatory performance engaging audiences in preparations for global climate disaster. The third activation, Plague (2020), was based on a script by Elston and Lion, examining humanity’s hubris in celebrating amidst a pandemic. 

The final activation, Circe: Twilight of a Goddess (2021), written and directed by Max Brumberg Kraus, centered on the mythic witch Circe of Aeaea, a sanctuary for exiled women and nymphs. Worn down by her immortality, Circe attempts to cast the ultimate spell: transforming an immortal into a mortal. This poignant narrative, created in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, served as a meditation on mortality, societal reckoning, and the passage of time, resonating deeply with the collective grief and existential questions of the era.

ET OLEUM AD INFLUUNT

From the Latin, “The Oil Will Flow,” Siren Island motto

Photographer Masha Mitkov & Carter Grimes

This work is influenced by research on the Oracle of Delphi as the center of the Ancient Greek world. The ancient cave in the mountain was understood as the vaginal opening of Gaia, the earth.

2021

Copper, sheet metal, tannic acid, cedar

The piece engages landscape as defined by the Anthropocene. The black ink produced by the catalyst of materials is the same used to write the Enclosure Acts; thousands of legal acts that whittled down and diminished the Commons of Europe. Between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual acts were put into place, enclosing 6.8 million acres in the United Kingdom alone. The copper rectangle creates a physical containment referencing these acts of portioning off land that have subsequently formed western civilization’s legal framework for property ownership and usage. The term ‘terracette’ are the horizontal tracks formed on hillsides where livestock graze. The tannic acid gradually corrodes the metal, leaving black crystallized layers as the liquid evaporates.

2019

6 x 2 x 1 feet

Black Reishi Mushroom (Ganoderma formosanum)

Here, a human form is displayed crawling towards an open window in the gallery. Failing to escape, she collapses in situ and her flesh transmogrifies. Fruitful Bodies is a sculpture made by growing a Black Reishi mushroom into a female figure without a head or hands. Lacking these appendages, the victim cannot be identified. This could be any one of the multitude nymphs, dryads, orades, or naiads that have suffered the same fate. In myth, the only defense these demigods possess is to relinquish their ichor, the power of divinity that flows in their veins. Under duress, they metamorphose into a natural formation, a stream, a stone or a species of tree, to avoid predation. This process is permanent and their sacrifice extinguishes any agency they once possessed.

Specifically, these transformed feminine bodies become resources for human consumption. The grotesque composition of their Fruitful Bodies offers an allegory for western civilization’s cultural domination over nature, to wit, the ubiquitous pattern of extractive policies towards nature through the commodification of women’s bodies.

In the detail images, Black Reishi primordia formations flush across the body, distorting the once-human shape as it becomes an object of nature.

“Many theorists have pointed out that the essence of a culture can be found in the degree of its domination of, or independence from, nature. In order to undertake the conquest of external nature, man had to conquer his own internal nature, making women the repository of all the qualities within him which he had come to fear and despise. This transformation amounted to nothing less than the transformation of human beings, male, and female, as well as the rest of the natural world, into the means of production.” - Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory

Circe: Twilight of a Goddess is a play about divinity at the edge of death. Circe is the witch and ward of the Isle Aeaea, realm of exiled women and wayward nymphs, but she has grown weary under the weight of a long, and tragic life. Dreaming of freedom, she attempts to cast the greatest spell of all: to make an immortal mortal. But with ruthless gods, violent men––even her own father––conspiring against her, what can one woman do?

Circe: Twilight of a Goddess is a unique immersive theatre experience that begins upon arrival. Musicians and performers escort the audience to the shore to usher in the new moon at sunset with a pre-show musical rite inspired by Seikilos Epitaph, the oldest complete musical composition in the world. Once the last color has drained from the sky the play will begin. With the audience seated at the edge of the water, the two floating stages become alive with this debut feminist retelling of an ancient myth. A live ensemble of Cello, Daf, Balağma, and Harmonium soundscape the adventure. Local gourmet food and drink will be served before and after the performance.

Circe was a collaboration between Siren Island & Max BrumbergKraus, an award-winning playwright. The pandemic has forced everyone to reckon with our relationship to death, society, and time. We have used this period of contemplation to prepare our most ambitious production to date, reflecting on these subjects, and also celebrating the ability to have live performances again.

Follow us @circe.twilight

And @sirenscopuli

Playwright & Director: Max BrumbergKraus 

Creator & Head of Production Lead: Serena JV Elston 

Costumes: Solange Stefanelli & Bela Reyes-Klein

Sound: Angela Lee 

Lighting: James Lucey

Stage: Siren Island @ Point San Pablo Harbor Marina

August 2021

2020

Oak gall ink, gelatin, steel pitchfork from an abandoned field

60 x 9 x 4 inches

A retelling of The Woodcutter and the Trees:

“When man approached the forest’s edge, he held the ax head in his open palm and wondered at the endless expanse of forest. Man asked the trees if they would supply him with a handle for his axe. The trees swayed in the wind and offered one of their ample branches to fulfill the request. Man, now equipped, wielded the sharpened blade and felled the first great tree.This sacrifice would keep his hareth warm through even the harshest winter, but chopping he continued. Yet another great tree fell to his axe. Surely, this must be all the wood he’d need. But he continued until a clearing formed. Yet, he did not stop for rest, nor for food. He chopped and chopped until all the trees fell, and, as they watched their brethren succumb to the ravenous appetite of the steel they cried amongst themselves, ‘But by the means of our own are we slain.’

The handle of this time-based sculpture is cast in gelatin catalysed with oak gall ink. This piece examines the Assyrian fable The Woodcutter and the Trees. With time, the oak handle of the pitchfork desiccates. It’s texture is still visible, but it is distorted and rendered unusable. This fable originally warned of the dangers of misplaced generosity. Rather than placing the blame on the trees, I reinterpret this allegory to warn humans of cutting down the hand that feeds them.

2019

Interactive Installation 00:10:00

Giant Fern, Capacitance Sensor, Projector

4 x 5 x 8 feet

This interactive installation introduces the audience to the idea of granting the natural world the rights of personhood. Presented from the first-person perspective of a fern, Locus Standi, or standing law, allows the plant to make the argument for itself that it deserves access to the rights, protections, privileges, and responsibilities of sentience.

The fern is wired with a capacitance sensor that responds to human touch. This purterbance advances the display through a monologue that invokes questions in the audience: How might a plant defend itself from humans? What do humans fear? Legal action? Hurting a feeling being? The following is an excerpt from the fern’s appeal:

“I am a social creature. I am complex. And it is time humans expand their definition of consciousness. / We plants have memories; we feel stress; we make decisions. Yet, you only see us as objects to decorate or weed away. / This is a demand for Locus Standi. That humans give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers, and to the natural environment as a whole. / You broke away from nature in your quest for enlightenment. You have your medicine and your compass and your weather prediction. Your enlightenment did not deliver you out of superstition but into the arms of another. / Advanced as you are, you still commit to the superstition that humans are separate from nature. / You’ve begun to talk about living in the Anthropocene, a world shaped by humans. / I suggest another name: the Eremocine. The age of loneliness.”

2017 - 2019

Immersive Spa

Spa Day was a free and public spa that predated the construction of Siren Island.

This immersive event explored how self-care can be an act of rebellion in a capitalist society. The events were located on or within close proximity to bodies of water. They offered a range of absurdist treatments that centered on the use of olive oil, an essential component of skin and hair care for the past 5,000 years. Used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Phoenicians, and Romans, civilizations rose and fell around the dynamism of this fruit’s juice.

Spa Day tapped into this history and offered participants a chance to be bathed in the “Blood of Your Vanquished Enemies.” We also offered “Preferential Treatment,” in which people scream cathartically while being beaten with red roses. The most popular treatment was a mud bath harvested from local clay deposits, a literal communion with nature. Participants could also exfoliate, cleanse, and moisturize using bowls of serums created from materials such as yogurt, sea salt, lanolin, charcoal, fruit, and vinegar.

Photographer Ashley Terry

2017

Photography

The Balance Of Ripe And Ruin is an exploration of how nature can restore the human body in times of stress as well as the power of imagination to be a sanctuary. Trauma physically impedes the communication between the mind and body. Imagination bypasses these obstacles and allows new pathways to form.

As a child, I would escape my home to my neighbors’ pumpkin field and sleep all night among the gourds. Their human-like shape cuddled me and offered me respite. The coldness of their flesh seemed to pull from my body the heated energy of coping with society. My recurring dream of curling up among these ataractic fruits always comes when I experience high levels of stress. For The Balance Of Ripe And Ruin, I designed, directed, and modeled for photographer Tod Seelie with 51 heirloom pumpkins.

Photographer Tod Seelie

2018 - 2019

"ET OLEVM AD INFLVVNT" meaning The Oil Will Flow.

These images development the visual language of Siren Island. They were produced to be distributed online via social media. They attempt to offer an alluring sensual space of power for the viewer.

Copy Language

RISING TITHE :

O Sailors! May this siren call turn you from your daily toil and wake you from the slumber of the Reality Machine! May it seduce you to surrender its beguiling comfort and convenience. May it entice you to abandon its chronic safety, to leap from shore into the undulating nethers, feel the chaos and discover the mysteries we offer. We sirens call now for your tribute.

Join the rising tithe!

Photographer Masha Mitkov

Collaboration with the Oakland based graffiti artist GATS (Graffiti Against the System) to make the first 3D sculpture of their iconic face design for Takashi Murakami's event, Complex Con.

2018

Immersive Design Installation

28 x 24 x 10 feet

Redwood, Aluminum, Linen

I designed and led the construction of Siren Island. Over several months, I coordinated with a team of welders in Detroit, MI, to fabricate the island’s aluminum frame from a 3D model created in Rhino and translated into technical construction sheets. The frame was then towed to Oakland, CA, and clad in reclaimed, old-growth redwood. This island is designed to be amphibious, allowing for two side platforms to break apart and stow within the hollow cave structure. After its first launch, to accommodate demand, a third pontoon was added to safely allow for up to 25 passengers. In the next evolution of Siren Island, the cave area will be converted into a steam room. This lair will emit a mist that will surround the floating platform. Additionally, floating pyres will mark the island’s breakwaters.

sirenisland.co

2016

500 Square Feet

Digital Architectural Design

“Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind” - N.K. Jemisin

Althing (n.) - the longest continually running parliament in the world, founded in 930 A.D., in Iceland.

Due to a fragile ecosystem, the inhabitants of Iceland have gathered annually for centuries to plan the evolution of their built world through a consensus model of community planning. Inspired by the Althing tradition of overseeing changes to the built environment, this transportable timber frame cabin integrates with a standard industrial shipping container. Its design manifests an experience of transportable permanence.

Prefabricated timber, along with all other components of the building, are shipped within the container. Upon arrival, it is emptied and used as a base structure. The timber structure is then assembled to wrap the shipping container, producing an open and dynamic space, generous in breadth and height, with a distinctive contemporary form.

The Althing Cabin is built with timber framing construction, which uses joinery instead of fasteners, creating a structural system aptly prepared to withstand seismic shifts and other extreme conditions.

The joinery allows for quick assembly and disassembly, leaving zero construction waste. This is in response to the fact that 40 percent of all solid waste produced annually in the U.S. comes from construction waste. The structures we create must also die, and I believe we should take into account their death as part of their creation.

No image or information display on this site may be reproduced, transmitted or copied (other than for the purposes of fair dealing, as defined in the Copyright Act 1968) without the express written permission of Serena JV Elston. Contravention is an infringement of the Copyright Act and it’s amendments and may be subject to legal action.

This agricultural project attempts to generate value separate from our creative labor. The process of monetizing the work of the artist erodes their role as a cultural generator. The Olive orchard offers a low-maintenance and drought tolerant asset that will produce revenue to be vested in artistic endeavors unsuitable by capitalist standards. This is a community project that hosts gatherings and live events in the natural vaginal shape the orchard creates. Art as Catharsis not Commodification.

Photographer Aaron Morganstein

2015-2019

Permanent Land Installation

12,000 Square Feet

Priorities was a land art project located in Canyon, CA, a secluded and undeveloped area 20 minutes east of Oakland, CA. After living in a self-constructed trailer for a year on the location, I wanted to look at how the natural cycles of nature could support and sustain an artist’s practice and the larger creative community.

The goal of the site was to establish and tend 12,000 sq. ft. grove of Castelvetrano olive trees, a variety recently made available in the U.S. and previously only grown in Italy.

The olive tree was selected for its phoenix-like qualities, resilience, and historical significance. Olive oil was the fuel, medicine, and staple of food for much of the ancient world. Industrial furnaces ran on it’s pumac, the lights in cathedrals burned from its second pressing, and the richest of the extra virgin was consumed fresh during every meal. The role this plant held in the ancient world can only be compared to the modern use of fossil fuels, all encompassing, and devastating when the supply is disrupted. The olive is capable of growing in the most adverse soil conditions and thriving where all other fruit trees would die. When fire consumes its branches, it sprouts new shoots from the root stock. I view this tree as an alternative to our dependency on oil and a remedy for the destructive fires that sweep California.

Priorities brought people together to plant and tend olive trees as well as for other creative events like live music, off-grid hot tub inventions, birthday parties, photoshoots, camp outs, and theater performances.

8,000sqft

Interactive Installation

I led a crew of 5 carpenters and 25 volunteers to construct the Ghost Ship Halloween event at Pier 10 in San Francisco, CA. This immersive haunted house used the techniques of psychological warfare, affronting the senses by controlling light, soundscapes, and disorienting the public as they entered a maze lined with vertical redwood bark. “The Sensory Overload Room” had walls with continuous projections of spam pop-up ads and dissonant static audio. “The Tunnel,” an almost pitch-black passageway with strips of iridescent silicon hairs hanging from the ceiling, would tickle the faces of people ambling through in the dark. “The Room of Fluids'' had a 400-gallon pool of yellow liquid with continuous walls of water cycling on either side of a rope suspension bridge that led to the final room, “The Rapture.” There, the audience found a three-story Baphomet sculpture suspended over a landscape with cascading fluid.

The Scraper Bike program offers youth a supportive group of peers and a chance to personalize (‘scraperize’) their bikes. The Scraper Bike Shed is located at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Oakland Public Library branch, in the heart of East Oakland. The scraper bike program both get tools into kids’ hands and give them a bicycle to fix and maintain. My design increases the square footage of the program’s shed and adds an outdoor classroom that could double as a movie screening area and bike-fixing space. The design added two enclosed areas for tools and supply storage, and a spray booth. The entire site will be enclosed with a custom fence made by the youth of welded bike wheels. The site would be completely updated to include outdoor work sinks, electrical, outdoor lighting, and seasonal sun/rain coverings.

In 2020 This design was awarded $400,00 from the Transformative Climate Communities Grant. Construction is set to begin in 2021

The role of the Public Library System is crucial to the diverse and unique populations of Oakland. During my time at Baran Studio Architecture, I had the privilege of working with the Tool Lending Library Branch (OTLL) as the Project Manager to develop a program and design that addresses their critical needs while accommodating the development of educational programs and future expansion plans. The main issues I identified were inadequate storage facilities and inappropriate accommodations for moving the tools through the circulation cycle. This caused a cascade of problems throughout the functionality of the library. The design I brought forward not only resolves these critical items but is an over-the-counter permit process and does not require historical review. All of these factors allow for an extremely cost-effective and time-efficient project that does not necessitate the OTLL to close during construction.

In 2020 This design was awarded $420,00 from the Transformative Climate Communities Grant. Construction is set to begin in 2021

Oakland, CA