Jenny Kendler + Jeremy Bolen, Lounging Through the Flood (Logistics Flow)

Vintage lawn chair lounger and life rings painted with Behr outdoors paint in “Climate Change” white
Approx. 48 x 68 x 88 in
2021

In our current era of climate crisis, catastrophic flooding events on the Mississippi river—so-called 1000 Year Floods—have become increasingly common. Evoking a madcap vessel built by climate refugees or disaster-wary survivalists, Lounging Through the Flood is a sculpture created to ride these rising waters.

Echoing the white-painted “ghost bikes” placed to memorialize cyclists, the sculpture is also painted white: in this case an off-white with a curious name. The Behr Paint company calls this particular shade, S350-1 “Climate Change”—and without irony, suggests it harmonizes with “Back to Nature” and “Rain Dance.”

The work exists in multiple forms, each with its own “footprint”: as a large-scale sculpture with 100 life rings which floated on the Mississippi itself, as a zero emissions augmented reality version which “floats” on the river in Dubuque—and this “portable” version, intended to travel through the logistics flow of shipping with a small carbon footprint. This iteration of the work rides a new flood: the tide of shipping materials generated by Amazon orders, Instagram ad purchases and the transportation of artworks. Lounging Through the Flood (Logistics Flow) offers an opportunity to reflect on this constant flow of commodities moving around the Earth, through rivers, roads and skies—an endless flood of materials—which create unimaginably vast waste streams in service of the systems which uphold global capitalism.