James Choucino

Loss of place or the idea of non-place, but more specifically how movement, transit or flow creates this. My practice currently considers groundlessness, the loss of the ground, earth, soil the total removal of a place, falling with nowhere to land. An escape plan, a lost paradise, stuck at terminal velocity, both pieces are escaping each other.

With nothing to support life what are we left with? An ecological catastrophe, a world that can no longer exist, an earth now gone, a relic of the past. Much of the work revolves around 'The Fall of Man' and the loss of Eden, pushed a step further, from loss of Eden to the loss of outside of Eden: the fall of our species finally completed. The ground once cursed to create toil and pain now unable to even produce the thorns and thistles that once hindered our survival.

The work considers the ability of technology to overcome these godly constraints placed upon humanity but also to overcome our own mistakes. Through systems and technologies, we can overcome our agricultural heritage through the use of hydroponics, a system without soil, a system that’s constantly moving.

Much of the work uses various techniques as well as aesthetics, a jumble of competing ideas, each one pulling you in the same direction through different means. Each piece works individually but also as a whole, pieces can have several uses or just a single one, the disposability of the work fluctuates with its intended purpose. Much of the work has a disposable aspect, whether it’s due to a life cycle or the nature of our culture to not place value within the material or process, much of this disposability also comes through the use of replication and reproduction.