Photos and videos: Matt Kenyon and Laura Marris
TIDE & Cloud
TIDE is a fifteen-foot-tall champagne glass pyramid installed within a New York storefront window, raising awareness about climate change.
Each glass contains a miniature model of a house cast out of a material the artist has developed, that has the same refractive index as water, making the houses invisible when they are submerged. Tide is responding to the next American housing crisis: property that has lost its value due to the effects of rising water and climate change.
TIDE will be exhibited until December, 2020 at two locations in Buffalo, NY, simultaneously – Eleven Twenty Projects and Big Orbit Project Space.
Moving to and from these two locations, as a street level performance, Matt Kenyon will be also showcasing Cloud – his installation that produces house-shaped forms out of helium foam. The clouds shrink and grow in response to real time housing and climate data, then rise to form a constellation or “neighborhood” floating for miles in the sky.
“Both works provide a visceral representation of the next housing crisis – when homes lose their value and families are displaced due to the forces of climate change. The viewers witness common house-ownership dreams disappear as fast as they materialize — just as many saw the false promises of their homes disappear as they were impacted upon during this period of global climate crisis.”
This work is part of our global art action with Countdown, TED’s global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. We worked with a group of TED Fellows on ten public artworks, all launching on 10.10.2020 in ten cities around the world. The goal – to raise awareness for Countdown, while translating key climate issues in ways that spur imaginations and trigger participation. See all projects here.
In TIDE, each glass contains a miniature model of a house cast out of a material the artist has developed, that has the same refractive index as water, making the houses invisible when they are submerged.
In Cloud, house-shaped forms are produced out of helium foam. They shrink and grow in response to real time housing and climate data, then rise to form a “neighborhood” floating for miles in the sky.
Photo: Bret Hartman / TED
THE ARTIST
Matt Kenyon is a new media artist and designer. Kenyon’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, MOCAD Detroit, Science Gallery Dublin, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, and the International Print Center. He is a TED Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and his work has been awarded the FILE Prix Lux.
His work has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, and Gizmodo, and has also appeared in edited volumes such as A Touch of Code (Gestalten Press) and Adversarial Design (MIT Press).
He lives and works in Buffalo, New York, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University at Buffalo, and part of PLATFORM, UB's socially engaged design studio.