Exhibit and Art Talk: Trash Puppets
April 30 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm MDT
EXHIBIT & ART TALK
TRASH PUPPETS
Thursday, April 30th | 7:00pm – 8:30pm
free
During his residency at Surel’s Place, Karl Erickson created a series of puppet-sculptures and experimental animations about waste along the Boise River Greenbelt. He collected trash on the shores of the river and assembled these objects into puppet-like figures. He then digitized them using 3D scanning processes. These digital “trash-puppets” will sing, dance, and tell stories of their unexpected journeys along the river, personifying the entanglements that bring human-generated material into contact with the more-than-human.
The Boise River simultaneously connects and separates (Garden City on one side, Boise on the other!) and is a powerful nexus for gatherings and departures. What do we bring with us to the river and what do we leave behind–materially, culturally, politically? Who handles this material, and whose stories are told or forgotten in the process? The trash-puppets will act as witnesses of these overlooked narratives, ultimately revealing evidence of a global system in which nothing is truly separate.
BIOGRAPHY
Karl Erickson (Tennessee) is an Associate Professor of Digital Art at Rhodes College. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts and his BFA from Wayne State University. He was raised in the Detroit-area of Michigan. He makes digital animations, videos, installations, and audio/visual performances. His screen-based work takes place in galleries, museums, film festivals and music venues.
Karl’s art is about recognizing the agency of all the other-than-human entities with which we share the Earth. This includes plants and animals, as well as machines, “inanimate matter,” electricity, waste, the macroscopic and the microscopic. The complex systems he uses in his art-making, from photogrammetry to modular synthesizers to data analysis, are analogous to the complexity of the ecosystem.
Karl’s animation Know No Now has been screened at the 2023 LINOLEUM Animation and Media Art Festival in Kyiv, Ukraine, Chroma Art Film Festival in Miami, FL (where it won the 2023 award for Best Animation), and the 2023 West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival. He has been an artist-in-residence at Hub Feenix in Finland, The Arctic Circle (twice!), Loop Art, Plyspace, and Signal Culture. He is a 2025 recipient of a Current Art Fund award from Tri-Star Arts.