The End Of You is the culmination of a year-long collaboration between Gray Area and Gaian Systems, with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, to explore the potential of immersive art for social impact through the Experiential Space Research Lab. The invited artists proposed novel experiences to cultivate planetary thinking.
Luxuriant Prolific Undying uses organic materials such as salt, wood and Oak Galls to create an alternative landscape. Visitors can embark on a guided audiovisual meditation while intimately seated next to a Cedar Root or laying under a Red Alder tree. Visitors are invited to listen to a guided meditation. This installation aims to dissolve ones ego by confronting the impermanence of life by creating a space to contemplate one's own death, and the mortality of all living things.
Review excerpt by ELI BLACK Mission Local
The main room begins with “The Luxuriant Prolific Undying,” by lead artist Yulia Pinkusevich, a slice of white-rock shore beneath red, fruit-like orbs hanging from the ceiling. It’s an otherworldly surface with two hunks of tree and roots suspended in the air. Grab a headset and sit down on a shaved stump, run the salt rocks through your fingers, and gaze out on the twisted colors and hallucinatory imagery of “The Uncanny Forest.” Experience large panels of abstract, psychedelic color like flowing lava. You’re led on a quasi-meditation by a strange ethereal voice, “Thoughts do not exist without bacteria.” The voice is omniscient and judgmental but nurturing. We’re reminded of our “stardust” beginnings, invited to re-examine the wasteful reality we participate in, and then are offered the freeing solace of considering our ultimate insignificance in the history of the universe.