Eli Brown
Power Bottom, 2022
Power Bottom is a sculptural installation at Franconia Sculpture Park, in Shafer, MN. A strap-on harness enlarged at 15 times normal scale, this sculpture is constructed from salvaged rubber, steel, and agricultural fencing equipment. This work is about power: the tension between dominant and submissive entities - the user and the used, land as sexual object and object of production.
Interspecies Intimacy Survival Kit, 2018
A prototype of a mycelial dildo - the world’s first living, fabricated phallus! This work imagines a techno-sexual future in which human beings have learned to procreate with fungi, the more advanced sexual and reproductive organism. For this installation, a phallus was constructed from a vacuum mold filled with sterile substrate and inoculated with Schizophyllum commune, a species of commonly-found fungi that contains over 28,000 sexes. Accompanied by a leather harness, inoculating equipment, a candle, and a collaged-over romance novel, this phallus can be utilized by all bodies.
Kingdoms 2023
A three-sided pyramid referencing Linnaeus' first three named kingdoms of life: flora, fungae, and fauna.
Toxic Places, 2018
This work uses driftwood to build a landscape of both real and imagined queer landmarks. The bodies of driftwood have holes which became hosts for biological organisms, so in their death, they create space for life - a metaphor for the power of queer generational knowledge transfer.
Greenhouse 2019
Greenhouse is a hand-built geodesic listening hub. The installation housed a recorded audio conversation I facilitated (as part of an ongoing intergenerational communication project) between three generations of trans people discussing age-related stigmas and their relationship to gender through time. Inside the dome are three tree stump seats which represent the three generations speaking in the audio. The structure was created using a triangle jig, which helped me construct dozens of beveled triangular sections which can be quickly assembled.