Lawn Extraction

June, 2012 / Bionic Garden / Flux Factory, Long Island City, NY

Lawn, grow lights, pedestal, postcards

A piece of lawn and soil was dug out of a yard in Pittsburgh and relocated to Long Island City for exhibition. This personal piece of turf served as a stand-in for lawns in general—the pervasive floor of the American landscape, sanitized with fertilizers, genetically fortified, and under constant threat of weedy invasion. A small gesture of land art, the opposite of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, for example, the hole in the ground and the piece of land extracted and relocated, spoke to the specificity of home and place. It also carried a personal story of immigration and migration, as the artist’s mother, a daughter of immigrants, had grown up in Long Island City; her daughter was returning soil from her own home to the same neighborhood. A souvenir postcard of this backyard land art was free to visitors, featuring a photograph of the hole left behind in Pittsburgh. This piece of soil was subsequently replanted at Socrates Sculpture Park.