Tribute Pallet is a multi-media installation that includes architecture, sculpture, video, and a 20-minute multi-channel sound piece.

The artwork invites the audience into a shack-like scaffolding construction. The architectural qualities refer to structures built in rapidly changing circumstances with found materials typically determined by purpose, necessity, scarcity, and economic interdependencies. The work's characteristics pay tribute to earthier dwellings primarily omitted by society yet occupying such a large part of our modern world. The patchworked handmade structure stands as an ode to the materials and methods used when access, time, and resources are limited yet are embodied with life, alternatively redefining what it means to be sheltered. In seduce and repulse, the artifact explores the aesthetic qualities of sculpture that triumph and deconstruct the spectrum from shelter to contemporary urbanism, which is erected in both opposition and sympathy to the utilitarian.

A table of sculptural sugar vessels proposes the commodity in reference to what had been historically the highest-traded product for roughly 400 years. Symbolically, sugarcane notes the transatlantic slave trade at the peak of European colonialism while also illustrating a ceremony on how the global economy came to blossom and its aftermath. Even today, sugar's ritual to pleasure is unrivaled, holding novelties of memory, production, and demand and revealing an unawareness in the active individual participation within unavoidable global markets.

3D Projections of hybrid chimeras surround the inner architecture as the sirens of the sound piece, blended with language and hymn. The score speaks to the complexity of inert cultural systems while offering perspectives on progress, sorrow, and transformation. The renderings allegorically intertwine a narrative between current aesthetics, being products of digital labor, and space they exist within. Their anthropomorphized bodies celebrate and expose the gesture of collective stress, sacrifice, and relief via their choreography.

Abstractly the elements in this conversation express a mastery of economic process, frivolity to consume, a fetish for the exotic, a force of power, the exodus and decimation of millions of lives, and an uncountable amount of labor. A perceived collapse of the systems we rely upon entirely is not a faraway apocalyptic future for many who remain anonymous.

Acknowledgments: Jason Ebeyer, Sound collaboration: Nick Weiss, with Vocalists: Star Amerasu, Najah Lewis, Chango4