Pearl C. Hsiung’s Holocene Screen was commissioned for the first Candlewood Arts Festival in 2019 and returns to Borrego Springs for the first time since its debut. The sculpture explores how we understand the terms natural, artificial, and cultural and how this framing impacts the way we move through the world. The structure, based on the honeycomb form of dried cholla or ocotillo branches, includes panels that incorporate unrecyclable plastic waste into colorfully rendered poems made in workshops with the Borrego Springs Boys and Girls Club and the Borrego Art Instiute. Its location in the bustling commercial center of Borrego Springs, surrounded entirely by the largest state park in California, amplifies its meditation on consumption, waste, and our relationship to the environment and each other.

Thanks to Jim Wermers and Susan Percival at The Mall for providing the site for this installation.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Pearl C. Hsiung is an artist and educator living and working in Los Angeles. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at CSULB and her recent large-scale tile mosaic commission “High Prismatic” is on view at the Grand Av Arts/Bunker Hill LAMetro station in downtown Los Angeles.

She has exhibited widely in international solo and group exhibitions, most recently at Art Space, Singapore; Maguro, Paris; and the Chan Gallery, Pomona College, Claremont, CA.

She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the California Community Foundation, National Parks Foundation, and New York’s Art Production Fund, among many others.