TRA
BOUSCAREN
Explore the work ↓Installations
01Pre-2025 Installations
I am a neo-cave painter. My installations are temporary environments exploring the intersection of media spectacle, waste culture, and climate change. I pull my primary materials from the waste stream. The dump is a great leveling field. It offers a negative portrait of our collective material desires. The dump represents everything we wanted, and then got, and then didn’t want anymore. Working with e-waste, billboards, salvaged neon, and metal from demolition sites, I build storms of trash suspended from the ceiling. Weaving security cameras through my installations allows me to project live video feeds of visitors back onto the exhibition they are viewing in real time. I take multiple live feeds, algorithmically mix them with calibration patterns, and redeploy them through a multichannel array, submerging the work in a projection-mapped video bath. This fractured remapping of the viewers’ live bodies onto the exhibition's material substrate doubles down on their implication in the work. What initially appears to be a candy-colored spectacle is revealed to be trash illuminated by surveillance.
Video archive
Zombimations ↗Doom Pop
02Jesus Saves
Jesus Saves examines the entanglement of faith, advertising, and death. We turn billboards into memento mori. Billboards operate as instruments of belief: they sell commercial products, political candidates, and spiritual promise equally. For this project, we reassembled religious billboards into human-scale body bags. Jesus Saves—once a slogan of ideological marketing—collapses into material reality when recast as body bags. Situated against migrant drownings in the Mediterranean, the work confronts the ethics of abandonment and economic coercion that lead to these deaths. Does Jesus save? Or is Jesus being used to sell the idea that death can be heaven?
Lampenflora
Lampenflora: plant growth resulting from artificial light installed in otherwise dark caves. We use salvaged advertising materials to make art about death and business and the business of death. Body bag sculptures made from reclaimed accident injury attorney billboards lie on the floor like inventory awaiting customers. Faceless corporate representatives stapled to the wall offer blank stares. Neon-spiked billboard vinyls, cut up and resewn into quilted absurdity, hang from the ceiling and walls. Digital collages composed of photos of physical sculptures in the gallery pre-digest exhibition content. The installation of advertising rendered in terms of its underlying violence.
Only Pay If We Win
ONLY PAY IF WE WIN transforms an accident-attorney billboard into body bags. Advertising is rendered in terms of the premise of the business it promotes. Accident injury attorneys make a profit from someone else’s injury or death. Who has to lose their health or their life in order for "us" to win?
Mixed Messages
Made from reclaimed billboards, these works cut apart and recombine the visual language of advertising. Slogans dissolve. Meaning appears fragmented, only in pieces. Bodies, logos, text, and graphic fragments become unstable compositions in which language gives way to composition. The billboard's promise of clear communication gives way to interference as images drift free of their original meanings,
ExMeLab
03Expanded
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05Tra Bouscaren is a Phoenix-based artist focused on spectacle at the crossroads of waste culture and the surveillance state. Bouscaren earned a BA in Philosophy, with Distinction in the Major, from Yale University and an Interdisciplinary Art MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He works an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. He's also the founder and director of the ExMeLab (Expanded Media Lab).
Bouscaren has exhibited at Vittorio Manalese (Berlin), the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the Victor I Fils Gallery (Madrid), the Malta Biennial (Birgu), Ammerman Triennial (New London), Mattress Factory Museum (Pittsburgh), Fort Mason Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Florida Prize Exhibition at Orlando Museum of Art, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia) and Lincoln Center (NYC), among other venues.
Research presentations and publications include: RE: SOURCE Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology (Venice), Dallas Contemporary, MOCA Tucson, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Stony Brook University Conference on Art and Philosophy, Studies In Control Societies Journal, Ildo Lobo Center for Culture (Praia), CAA Conferences (Chicago and LA), the Rubin Center for Visual Arts (El Paso), and the FLAT Journal (UCLA). Bouscaren builds projects with a broad array of visual artists, performers, hackers, musicians, and scholars through the Expanded Media Lab, which he founded in 2019.