TRA BOUSCARENInstallation / Expanded media

TRA BOUSCAREN

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INSTALLATIONS

Pre-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.

DOOM POP

Doom Pop is a collaborative installation by Jeremy Ripley and Tra Bouscaren about business and death and the business of death. We make objects and environments out of reclaimed billboards and neon. Billboards become memento mori; corporate slogans and images, once meant to seduce, become monuments to disaster. Turning spectacle against itself, Doom Pop presents a storm of reconfigured media, rendering advertising in terms of its effects.

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. Lampenflora 2 invites viewers into a haunting installation of reconfigured media, rendering advertising's impact in terms of its underlying violence.

We target billboards from industries that profit from human suffering and death. We turn them into memento mori. We recast corporate slogans and images, once meant to seduce, as monuments to disaster. The tornado points to climate change and the churn of consumption; the body bags mark its human toll. Turning spectacle against itself, Doom Pop invites viewers into a storm of reconfigured media, where advertising's allure is rendered in terms of its underlying violence.

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About

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Tra Bouscaren

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA

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Tra Bouscaren is a Phoenix-based installation artist working across sculpture, painting in the expanded field, video, and conceptual art. His dark, immersive environments repurpose salvaged billboards, neon, e-waste, and surveillance imagery, joining culture jamming to projection and site-responsive sculpture. 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 as 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.