Eco-system originally began as a collection of 525 miniature dioramas. Each diorama is priced at $20. If purchased, the viewer can take their diorama with them, in which case a Polaroid photo is taken of the piece, and the money goes to the artist, or the purchaser can leave the diorama at the gallery seperate from the others so that noone else can take it (mimicing a nature preserve), and the money goes to local ecological preservation. The piece results in a quantitative tally-chart that shows the values and actions of the visiting population and reinforces that each viewer’s consumer choices impact the environment outside of the gallery.
The installation was originally sponsored by the Barbara Ann Levy Gallery for the Cherry Grove Arts Festival on Fire Island, NY in 2005. The Fire Island shoreline is eroding the beaches and the land under the houses that are built along the shore. One proposal to deal with the is a community-initiated project called the land buy-out proposal, where community members buy and attend to specific sects of land. Another proposition is headed by the Army Corps of Engineers, which proposes to dump several tons of sand on the beach. These possible solutions became the foundations for the range of actions viewers can carry out in the installation.
The installation has been shown at several other venues since 2005, and the pile gets smaller for each exhibition. A record of each exhibition's interactions is available.
