molecules of US freedom

This installation overlays three abstract photographs of my apartment in Chicago, IL after a fire in my building covered the walls in soot, in the summer of 2017. The gauze-like material of the prints reveals three layers of destruction while keeping the audience from discerning any physical object in the overall picture. By doing so, I suggest a parallelism between my own experience being exposed to this highly toxic substance to the role that soot plays in the greenhouse effect. Soot, the resulting product of incomplete combustion of organic materials, is made up largely of amorphous carbon among other carbon allotropes. The Trump administration, which has vocally denied the existence of global warming, is a key proponent of fossil fuels as inherently American resources to be enjoyed by the rest of the world in lieu of renewable energy. As such, at the end of May 2019, the U.S. Department of Energy, rebranded hydrocarbons as “Molecules of U.S. Freedom”.