Zoe Orlino, a graduate student in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers, finished installing a series of art pieces integral to her thesis project. These handcrafted pieces are meant to reveal a hidden story embedded in the landscapes at the Abbott Farm Marshlands located in Hamilton Township, New Jersey.

Her thesis looks at the traditional process of mapping and analysis and aims to overlay new layers of meaning through the material qualities in objects. Each installation throughout the marsh is a collection of salvaged objects and plants recontextualized into an objet trouvé, a once discarded item imbued with new purpose and presented as a gift. According to Zoe, by looking at the objet trouvés throughout Abbott Marshlands, her perception of the landscape has changed permanently.

Using nature and its gift (the terrain, soil, clay, flowers), Dineo Seshee Bopape aims to represent land as a container of memory, history, life, and death. The use of representing voids in the earth to represent something greater must be kept in mind. The use of representing voids in the earth to represent something greater must be kept in mind. 

This mix media site-specific installation “Moulded and compressed soil structures created from locally sourced soils, feathers, brass uterus forms, clay pieces moulded by a clenched fist, 18 carat gold leaf, loose soil, healing herbs” (Bopape).

Prisbrey’s Bottle Village, in Simi Valley California, is a key example of how the assemblage of objet trouvés can impact the personal meaning in form and thus community understanding of the terrain. Built from bottles, cement, and debris gathered from a local dumb, Bottle Village covers a third of an acre with ethereal structures ranging from buildings to gardens and wishing wells. Prisbrey recontextualizes discarded junk into new objects that carry a whole new meaning and perspective. In this case, she flips the meaning of the pencil, the ultimate tool for creating the art that is typically framed, on its head and makes the pencil the center of attention instead. She started the project in 1956 as a way of overcoming tragedies that she suffered, most notably the agonizing death of six of her seven children, throughout her lifetime.  Her bricolage is a form of physically and emotionally putting things back together.

Rafa Esparza’s Staring at the Sun includes a series of paintings – portraitures, landscape, and abstraction – on the surface of adobe bricks. He creates a new space out of the adobe bricks he and his family labored to make – creating a new physically brown space in a white room as a form of reclamation and physical visualization of representation.

“My interest in browning the white cube — by building with adobe bricks, making brown bodies present — is a response to entering traditional art spaces and not seeing myself reflected. This has been the case not just physically, in terms of the whiteness of those spaces, but also in terms of the histories of art they uphold,” Esparza was quoted saying in an interview to ArtForum in November 2017

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