Gardens of the Future: Conversation in Memorial
Sculptural installation, exhibited at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2012) and Wheaton College (2013) Gardens of the Future: Conversation in Memorial is a habitat for conversation and contemplation built out of the invasive plant Oriental Bittersweet, a rapidly spreading vine that grows voraciously throughout the East Coast. Since 2011, through an ongoing series of dialogue-based performances in hand-woven sculptures for two, Sutton has collected over 200 future extinctions:...
Read MoreWearable Gardens
A Platform2 Participatory Performance, 2011 Arnold Arboretum, Boston, MA On a sunny, unseasonably warm October afternoon, nine people gathered in a circle and wrote a story. The story was of a tree seed – the sugar maple – at risk of survival due to the environmental impacts of climate change, and the possibilities of its migration north. It was a story in action and of action, told next to a 200 year old Sugar Maple at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Massachusetts,...
Read MorePromiscuous Production: Breeding is Bittersweet
A National Bitter Melon Council Public Sculpture and Interactive Outdoor Installation, June – November 2010 Group Exhibition: EAT LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Promiscuous Production: Breeding is Bittersweet was a large-scale, public installation in the form of an organic “farmden”(farm + garden) that housed an experimental effort to breed a hybrid variety of melon, a Bittersweet melon. It was installed as part of the group show, EAT LACMA, at the Los Angeles...
Read MorePromiscuous Production: Meeting is Bittersweet
A National Bitter Melon Council Public, Interactive Intervention, Nov. 7, 2010 Group Exhibition: Let Them EAT LACMA, a 1-day performance event celebrating the closing of the garden-focused exhibition: EAT LACMA (June – November, 2010) Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Meeting (and its aftermath) carries the essence and inevitability of human contact: exchange, wonder, and change. This Meeting is Bittersweet, a human-scale manifestation of the National Bitter Melon...
Read MoreCultural Prophylactics
A Research-Based Performance piece, 2009 Version Fest, Chicago, Il Cultural Prophylactics was a research-based performance piece that poses culture as a matter of public health, as a necessary aspect of free speech in a democracy, and as a commodity with a value beyond financial. It explored the questions: What of our culture requires protection? And what of it should we protect ourselves from? Performed at Version Fest, an arts and culture festival in the South Side of Chicago, in 2009,...
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