Created for the Northern Gallery with the participation of 30 students from Northern State College in Aberdeen, South Dakota.
Sugar City sits atop an eight-foot square light box, glowing like a mirage of modern culture—beautiful, enticing, and fragile.
This immersive installation portrays a society consumed by sensationalism, relentlessly chasing the new, no matter the ecological cost. A culture dazzling on the surface, but slowly succumbing to decay beneath.
The city was collaboratively imagined during a series of brainstorming sessions with the students. Within just two weeks, the entire city emerged—hand-carved from white candle wax, partially melted under heat lamps, then lavishly coated with sugar.
Once completed, we released 1,000 California Harvester Ants into the sugar-coated metropolis. What followed was a living performance of consumption, transformation, and inevitable erosion.
Artist’s Reflection
Sugar City was more than an installation—it marked a pivotal moment in the evolution of my practice. It brought together my fascination with impermanence, my interest in living systems, and my deep commitment to collaboration.
Although I never pursued a formal professorship, I’ve always loved working with students. This was my first opportunity to lead a group as a visiting artist, and it set the stage for what would become a defining pattern in my career: gathering bands of misfit artists and guiding them toward something bold, ambitious, and often improbable. This early experience paved the way for future collective projects like artnetweb and PORT: Navigating Digital Culture—works that relied not just on vision, but on trust, improvisation, and a kind of organized chaos.
The influence of my long-time friend Aldo Moroni is deeply embedded in Sugar City. Aldo and I had created Wax Globe together for the Minnesota Museum in the early 1980s, and his obsessive, city-building imagination stayed with me. The cityscape imagery in Sugar City grew directly from that collaboration, and from the sense of awe I felt watching him construct entire miniature civilizations.
The residency at Northern State College came through sculptor and professor Mark McGinnis, whose own work is steeped in narrative and critique. Mark opened the door, and Aldo’s legacy lit the path.
Looking back, Sugar City feels like a convergence point—where personal history, artistic lineage, ecological critique, and communal effort all came together in a single, sugar-dusted moment.