Surel's Place

Exhibit and Art Talk: Trash Puppets
2026-04-30 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Boise) | Surel’s Place, 212 E. 33rd Street, Garden City, 83714, United States
EXHIBIT & ART TALKTRASH PUPPETSThursday, April 30th | 7:00pm – 8:30pmfree

at Surel’s Place: 212 E. 33rd Street in Garden City

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.

Thank you to Karl Erickson’s Residency Sponsors:

Exhibit & Art Talk: Penitent
2026-07-11 19:00 - 22:00
EXHIBIT & ART TALKPENITENTSaturday, July 11th | 7:00pm – 10:00pm

free

Artist-in-Residence Camilla Taylor focused their residency on a series of drawings referring to the myth of St. Mary of Egypt. She is depicted covered in her own hair after decades of an ascetic life wandering through the desert. Presumably, even her clothes disintegrated. Rather than decades, Taylor lost nearly everything in mere moments. All their artwork and possessions at their Altadena home and studio were destroyed in the Eaton Fire of 2025. They recently curated the group exhibit My House Burned Down at the Track 16 Gallery in Downtown LA, which closed in June, 2025, and in a solo exhibition and catalog at Track 16 Gallery in East Hollywood, Unkindness, that dealt with themes of atheist mysticism, which closed in January 2026.

“This loss and displacement changed the way I make art,” Taylor says, “My work became more fragile and more precious.” However, hair is a theme they’ve used often as a motif in their work. It is a symbol of the body and a material that is both deeply corporeal and also has near magical qualities in many cultures, controlled in how it’s cut and worn and revealed. Taylor references hair also as a symbol of femininity, and their own ambivalence towards it. This will be explored in drawings, prints, and sculptures referring back to the myth of St. Mary of Egypt, and the larger corporeal and quasi magical qualities that hair represents.

Also available to see by appointment July 11th – 13th by emailing camilla.a.taylor@gmail.com. You may also request a preview PDF.
