Project Gallery
Explore a vibrant collection of climate-driven projects by USC students—ranging from immersive films and sustainable design prototypes to mixed media art and digital storytelling. Each work reflects a unique intersection of creativity and climate consciousness.
The ACC project is a journalism portfolio highlighting environmental health news, including proposed environmental legislation, current climate issues, and public health studies. Articles have covered recent news — such as environmental health policies regulating PFAS ('forever chemicals') — and studies of systemic health effects and population health research. The articles highlight current environmental health issues to promote health equity through community advocacy, climate mitigation efforts, and interprofessional collaboration. Covering environmental health issues, the articles are intended to advocate for equitable policies, environmental justice, and public health.
My envisioned project is called “On Wings”. Since my primary study is environmental data science with a focus on bird conservation, I want my project to be a discussion on how Los Angeles could become a more sustainable habitat for birds. I have worked as a freelance illustrator, thus my primary medium will be digital illustration and animation. Since habitat fragmentation caused by urbanization is a major cause for species extinction, my project will discuss how urban landscapes may contain the possibility of adapting into an artificial habitat for wildlife, bringing connection between their natural habitats.
Los Angeles, especially its coastlines, has provided sanctuary for many local and migratory birds like snowy plovers, California Least Tern, etc. In my project I want to envision how we could transform the existing landscape so that it can provide more ecological services to both people and birds. Specifically, how parts of the urban landscape could be redesigned to accommodate more wildlife, and become a transfer hub for migratory birds.
This project will strike a balance between sparking a radical queer imagination and grounding it through the effect of the built environment. We will explore two aspects of reimagining L.A. an architectural redesign of public institutions and a fictional explorative narrative piece. All pieces will work in tandem to create an exhibit-like experience where the viewer can progress alongside the reimagining of L.A., seeing themselves within this newly designed space and encouraging their own radical imagination of the city.
By referencing community enhancement projects such as “New Public Hydrant” by Chris Woebken and “Testbeds” by New Affiliates, the design concept of the project shares a similar goal to repurpose scrap construction materials with consideration to better the built environment of communities. According to CalRecycle, construction and demolition materials make up about 25% of California's waste disposal. What if those materials were repurposed into public infrastructure that considers healthy public rituals with the built environment while keeping them out of the landfill? This project would do just that–create communal contact zones bolstering the Angeleno identity for the people of Los Angeles while eliminating construction waste.
The narrative piece follows the Angeleno body and mind highlighting the Angeleno cultural/spiritual experience that must be preserved and accentuated by our new reimagining for a truly sustainable, equitable, and healthful future. This piece will illustrate the re-resourced infrastructure design done in the other half of the project, demonstrating how the body interacts within the physical space. To create the narrative we will reference Jose Esteban Muñoz’s ideas of queerness as the horizon from his book Cruising Utopia, highlighting the radical queer potential of agency and joy. This will be done in either a narrative animated short or interactive media.
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I would like to install a body of work that is focused on a site-specific sculptural installation. My idea for the piece emerges from a continuing body of work that I have been developing both independently and in academic settings for over three years now.
My work tends to have a considerably large scale, therefore, I would likely install one focal piece using the entire floor of the gallery to create an immersive space. The piece would be made up of 100 resin chickens and is a continuation of a series of paintings completed in March 2024.
Conceptually, this body of work is rooted in an investigation of late stage capitalism in its seductive cruelty. Human history is brimming with examples of our manipulation of the Earth and all its creatures. This exploitation had been heavily accelerated over the past few hundred years with the rise of colonialism and the industrial revolutions that followed; in the last one hundred years indeed, the issue has dramatically increased even further.
Chickens become symbols of consumption. The consumer society in which we live (in the West) utilises chickens in perverse, exploitative ways, as seen through the exhaustive mass-poultry industry. They are indeed a perfect microcosm of capitalist socio-economies, whose overall goals and habits in turn are harmful to the individual, the planet, to the working class, and to an extent, even to the ruling class, whom the system supposedly serves to benefit.
The aim of this series is to bring about questions about the institutions and conventions of consumer culture that continue to allow atrocities at local and global scales to occur, poisoning the land and water, disconnecting the consumer from the animal life that is lost in mass-meat agriculture, the consistent instant gratification and the idea that we should want all of this. Further, the piece will explore in particular hens and their role as the primary commodity of the poultry industry owes itself as a mirror to the reproductive social labour expected of women in a patriarchal capitalist society.
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