Published September 11, 2020
PLAY/GROUND 2020
“Spent” by Visiting Assistant Professor Becky Brown, now on display as part of "Playground"
A celebration of the resilience of artists, creativity, community, and our shared future. Featuring UB faculty members Becky Brown and Shasti O'Leary Soudant
SEPTEMBER 11-20
BUFFALO, NY
About Playground
PLAY/GROUND 2020 is organized by Resource:Art and the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art and is being reimagined for our current times. This year, we’ll install outdoor art projects at sites across Buffalo including the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the Hotel Henry, and at Larkinville. Installations will be specially made to be experienced while social distancing. Projects and final locations will be announced in August, and the projects will be installed in early September.
The installations will be free and open to the public.
“OCTOBLOC!” (Canalside)
Shasti O'Leary Soudant
Utilizing the same colorful octagonal modular components that make up GUT FLORA, O'Leary Soudant's sculpture in the Jacobs Medical School Allen Street Metro station, teams of participants will rearrange this free-standing sculpture each day.
“Spent” (UB Anderson Gallery)
Becky Brown, @beckybrwn
“Spent” is an uncooperative ATM machine that suggests the promise of cash, and instead delivers an aggressive vomiting-up of household objects – perhaps someone’s treasured belongings; perhaps trash. It reflects legacies of disinvestment laid bare by Covid-19, now causing economic hardship rivaling the Great Depression and also how technology changes the shape of everything and makes “stuff” disappear. As cash transactions become scarce, and increasingly so during Covid-19 as we opt for “no-touch” payments, ATMs may soon go the way of the payphone and boombox, the dictionary, and the atlas.