DELUXED examines the heritage of colonialism and its subconscious effects on our relationship with the natural world.

Through this series of mixed media, photographic, and sculptural work, Margaret Wingard considers what effect humans’ self-consciousness of their primal origins has on their definitions of a civilized society and how they interact with the earth. The sensual nature of status symbols and the drive to assert dominance over nations and landscapes exemplify this tension.

The materials and media used in this exhibition utilize various physical barriers we maintain between our bodies and the world around us. We rely on these separations to facilitate, protect, and regulate our engagement with the fecundity of the wilderness while elevating our human experience. Turf, cars, glass, cement, plastic — these inventions, while distinctly human, are also appropriations of the planet’s preexisting elements.

With this work, she asks: if, in any chemical reaction, matter is neither created nor destroyed, at what point does an abstraction of it become unnatural?