March 16 - 25, 2026

 

In 2010, my home in Nashville, Tennessee, was submerged in a once-in-a-generation flood. At the time I was working with my grandad repairing furniture, and as we visited different homes across the city, I was able to see the extent of the damage done to our community. Fourteen years later, Southern Appalachia was struck by Hurricane Helene, causing catastrophic flooding. These events are no longer anomalies. They are part of a pattern.

 

Tennessee’s landscape has been shaped by extraction, damming, industrialization, and development. The ways we alter land and water mirror the ways we structure power and care within our communities. pond//dreams considers how these impacts accumulate and ripple through time.

 

In the center of the installation is a pool of water with a speaker embedded beneath its surface. A projector casts footage of the Appalachian Mountains alongside images of the Chilhowee Dam, constructed to power the nearby Alcoa aluminum plant. Any sound you make is played through the speaker, generating visible sound wave patterns across the water. These cymatic patterns are the physical shape of your voice.

 

Composed of a sculptural basin, ceramic cairns, red earth, projected light, sound-responsive code, and field recordings, pond//dreams uses resonance as both material and metaphor. The work invites viewers to witness how vibration travels, how actions leave traces, and how even subtle gestures reshape a shared environment.