Introduce Artist

Sena Clara Creston

@Sena_clara_creston

Sena Clara Creston is an interactive installation artist and educator originally from New York City, where she learned the power of creating handmade personal space from repurposed material. Creston learned to use the power of the light and the image studying photography and imaging at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. She incorporated animatronics at Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute where she built responsive installations to reflect the viewer’s actions. Creston moved to California in 2020 to work as a media arts professor at Sonoma State University, where she teaches her students the power and poetry of their personal story. Creston created installations for galleries, museums, and festivals, and conferences including the Borealis Festival of Light, Treefort, The Tri Cities Airport, Museum of Sonoma County, EBCH Museum, Jundt Art Museum, CoCA Seattle, The Wassaic Project, and TEDx Richland. Plastescape is a robotic installation comprised of the Huminal, The Plastic Garden, and The Willow of the Waste. This enterable landscape is made from used plastic about the environment’s response.

Artwork

HuminalTitles (by Sena Clara Creston)

Huminal is designed to question the relationship between humans and the other. In a dimly-lit space, an animalistic humanoid robot paces back and forth in front of the entrance to a fiery red cave. It’s a sentry protecting its lair. When the Huminal “senses” an intruder in the space, it stops and turns its head and glows red, voicing its displeasure, fear and aggression. The viewer is then forced to respond to this challenge, deciding whether to heed the warnings of a being of unknown power and back off, or confront the Huminal as an artwork to be examined and understood. Upon inspection, familiar materials reveal a second ambiguous relationship. The Huminal and cave are built from discarded plastic water bottles and plastic bags; the bringer of life and the polluter of land. We made this angry environment where we are not welcome.

PlasticGardenTitles (by Sena Clara Creston)

The Plastic Garden is an illuminated interactive flower garden embedded with sensors, actuators and lights to detect and respond to the viewers’ movements. Animated to recall a slow, rhythmic breathing by opening and closing petals and softly pulsating light, the flowers harness the contemplative feeling people get while immersed in a dependable rhythmic environment. Once the viewer gets within range, robotic flowers transform, enclosing their petals within their leaves, shaking as if they were nervous. If the viewer continues to approach, the flowers respond by becoming aggressive, snapping their petals and leaves open and shut. Only when the viewer retreats will the flowers relax, open their leaves and expose their petals. The viewer in turn reacts to the flowers. They will either retreat apologetically or embrace confrontation with the skittish sculptures and approach them as a piece of art to be examined and understood. Animating my sculptures makes them seem alive, so how they are made should make sense within the imaginary world from which they come. I use poignant repurposed materials and obsolete technology to seduce my viewer into a familiar fantasy while illuminating social choices. Upon inspection, these flowers are built from discarded plastic water bottles and shopping bags, alluding to the human tendency to transform, and ultimately destroy nature with progress. Our actions have profound affect on the world around us, but often go unnoticed for better and for worse. The Plastic Garden is a transformative environment that through action and reaction, material and allusion and fantasy and reality, ask the viewer to question their actions in the past, present and future. Engineering Support was provided by students from the Robotics Club at Washington State University.

WillowTitles (by Sena Clara Creston)

The Willow of the Waste is a responsive, enterable tree-cage built to harnesses the contemplative feeling people get while immersed in a dependable rhythmic environment. Built from discarded plastic water bottles and shopping bags, The Willow of the waste alludes to the human tendency to control and ultimately destroy nature with technology.