Audrey Snyder & Joe Riley’s collaborative sculpture, Into the ground, reflects on how urban ecologies uptake and transform contaminants, and how collective bodies realize agency through ground-up organizing. A rust-dyed cover, created through participatory workshops over the summer, shrouds a car-shaped steel armature, engaging with Socrates Sculpture Park’s history of transformation from landfill to public park. Into the ground calls on visibility and invisibility of discarded objecthood: is it an abandoned vehicle or a public monument? A rusted relic or a deliberate composition? A landfill or a park?

This project was originally commissioned for The Socrates Annual at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. For the sculpture’s west coast debut at The Bowtie (LA), Riley and Snyder adapted the structure to include a seat, re-upholstered with a rust-dyed cover made during participatory workshops at Socrates. During these workshops, attendees excavated iron objects from the park and participated in a communal rust-dye to produce an abstracted imprint of discarded material. This process highlights practices of use, abandonment, and alchemical transformations over time.