Hannah Chalew salvaged an old oil well from the Poland Avenue scrap yard in New Orleans. She coated it with bagasse, or sugar cane pulp, from Grow Dat, the urban farm in City Park. The paint is recycled, from another nonprofit, the Green Project, and the plants — palmettos, cypress, elephant ear — are largely from the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana’s greenhouse.
The embedded plastic trash — a toothbrush, a COVID-19 test, an old burned CD — “came from my life,” she said. “Plastic will be a fossil marker of our time, here long after we’re gone.”
The result is an artwork that gestures at what humans might leave behind, a sculpture called “Orphan Well Gamma Garden.” It’s a window into the post-apocalypse, where the stuff of civilization has coagulated around Chalew’s reclaimed steel wellheads, that questions the kind of future that humans are creating, and what might survive us.
“I felt kind of like a reverse archaeologist, imagining how some person in the distant future would think about this, like, disembodied sippy-cup top,” Chalew said. “What will the people, or the creatures, who encounter this make of it?”…