Containment: Carrie Sieh

Containment is a site-specific installation that visualizes the historical and contemporary connections between consumerism and climate change, profit and exploitation, racism and policing, industry and environmental injustice—and serves as a platform from which to advocate for impactful structural change.

In this installation, multiple trajectories of containment are embodied, critiqued, and proposed. Symbols of mid-century suburbanism, consumerism, and isolationism are starkly arranged, set-like, as if awaiting actors: a patio chair, wood-look vinyl floor tiles, breeze blocks. A television loops a time-lapse video of house plants. Blue painter’s tape and a strip of red fabric emerge side by side where wall meets floor, as if originating from within the framework of the building. Traveling across surfaces and space, they evoke redlining and “the thin blue line,” rising water levels, “red tape” and crime scene cordons. Live plants meander throughout, as if reclaiming a decaying ruin. The backdrop to this tableau is a charcoal silhouette contrasted against silver foil—shadow suggestions of leaves, vines, fruits, and sugarcane in a visual mashup of the space race, the silver standard, blast shadows, South Florida monoculture, industrial pollution, and the persistent equilibrium-seeking of the natural world.