Infinite Nature Advertisement

Textile Collage Installation with Projection Animations
Created by Morgan Rice and Charlie C Wilcox
at Sou’wester Arts Week 2026 in Seaview, WA

Inspired by the motif of the looping light-box advertisements, often found in dive bars and hearkening back to an analog era of the 1970s, Infinite Nature Advertisement twists the perpetual idyllic Eden featured in those advertising pieces to capture our current moment of perpetual crisis. Morgan, growing up in Washington state, had the iconography of Mount Saint Helens impressed upon her from an early age, and we quickly turned to the concept of a volcanic eruption as a way to disrupt the too-perfect scenery. This dovetailed well with my interests in nuclear anxieties and the fear of annihilation via mutually assured destruction that has lingered in the shared consciousness long after the so-called end of the Cold War. Volcanoes are a close natural cousin to the lurking threat of the bombs yet to go off.

When devising this piece and discussing the nostalgic appeal of those beer advertisements, tenuously connected to the rustic landscapes they use to sell their product, we quickly turned to a discussion of time, as we are wont to do. We were confronted with the challenge of depicting a volcanic eruption in a loop; do we show the eruption from start to finish, ever erupting and contracting? We decided this felt inauthentic and provides too much of a narrative of disaster and recuperation. What modern existence feels more like, rather, is a perpetual eruption, unending views into catastrophe and inhumanity, with no refractory period to recover and face the next crisis. And yet, those crises and disasters have been subsumed to an overall field that also includes everything we hold to be miraculous about life and the world around us. It’s hard to see one without seeing the other, and seeing them both continuing to flow in one frame can feel like the most maddening experience of all.