Bloom

"Bloom" is a single-channel video installation and a series of photographic objects that explore the ecological tensions between industrial agriculture and aquatic ecosystems. Set in the Maumee River Watershed, one of the largest in the Great Lakes region spanning the U.S. and Canada, the project views this landscape as a local manifestation of global conditions. The unchecked use of nitrates and chemical fertilizers across the world has intensified nutrient runoff, contributing to increasingly frequent and severe algal blooms in lakes, rivers, and oceans alike. The video captures nighttime scenes of the expansive corn and soybean fields of the Corn Belt, as well as concentrated animal feeding operations, railroads, grain elevators, and rural-industrial communities. These images trace the largely invisible journey of agricultural runoff into surrounding waterways and toward Lake Erie, where recurring toxic algal blooms reveal the ways in which industrial food systems reshape aquatic ecologies and affect nearby communities. Alongside the video, "Bloom" presents photographic objects depicting a new generation of grain elevators. These monumental storage infrastructures hold unprecedented volumes of harvested corn and soy, enabling their capture, preservation, and global circulation. In the United States, corn is also a major source of bioethanol, linking agriculture directly to the petrochemical industry. The photographic objects themselves are grown from living algae and function as "living photographs" that echo the blooms the project investigates. Using a modified projector, we cast an image onto a tray of the freshwater algae strain Chlorella vulgaris. Over time, the organisms respond to the projected light by growing into the shape of the image. In this process, the subject of the work becomes its medium. The same biological processes that drive harmful blooms are harnessed to produce images reflecting on them.