Trash Strata

Lucas Cook & Natalie Hayes

Opening Reception Friday, September 22, 7–10pm

BICA School Project Space

09.22.2023 – 10.31.2023

“The symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum.” – Philip K. Dick

Trash Strata is a series of offerings from Lucas Cook and Natalie Hayes manifested by way of material mimicry, lottery, junk, and kitsch. This exhibition was born at/around Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park in the form of an ongoing collaborative practice of refuse collection and connection; upon finding a severely underappreciated site with a propensity for accumulating impressive quantities of garbage, an impulse to accumulate and conglomerate arose. Trash Strata, in general, intends to articulate and distribute the unique energetic qualities of that site and, in this particular iteration, intends to zoom in and out of a generalized though highly recognizable American landscape, revealing its industrial history, interminable development, and implicit mystery. This work is, at its core, a visceral response to a high saturation of supposed uselessness at an imagined intersection of mystique and bureaucracy. In short, it is an argument in favor of the possibility of enchantment at Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park despite its banality and filth and, furthermore, the possibility of enchantment in all banality and filth.