House

House
2026

house: 
discarded cranberry industry pallet, neighborhood house fire salvaged charred wood, boat yard wood discards and brackets, estuary high-tide-line plastic, wood and rope, fire lane curb fragment

bedroll:
 desert dry wash comforter cover and street-found blanket

windpack: 
discarded shade tent poles, tent poles and kite poles, architectural lumber wrap, household window blind string and hardware / backpack frame and harness, fake fireplace plastic, seed spreader disc / washed ashore watercraft paddle/blade and wood stake with string

pole motion light:
 rubbish pile wood post and motion light fixture, thrifted extension cord

sandbag: 
sand from California’s Salton Sea (an environmental hotspot and jumble of human interventions in the Colorado Desert of southern California), belt and fabric from a comforter cover found in a dry wash/arroyo in Joshua Tree, sandbag liner from a roadside DIY Sandbag Station in Oregon City, Oregon

Dawn Stetzel’s sculptures in this exhibition reflect on housing insecurities and communities dissolved or on-the-move from climate induced retreat. Her material choices are gleaned discards that relate to the social stratification that defines and restricts mobility and access to resources. This work contains moments of alarm and distress weighted by the collective moral injury of today, and at the same time hopeful realities of tomorrow. The objects are technological conflations, contraptions hinting at a commitment for survival, moving with optimism and climate resilience into a future view of cohesive equity.

“I embrace the idea of optimism for the future. The future does not look like today. My work becomes ambitious attempts at re-imaginging a sustainable existence, creating tools and mobile contraptions that function with a tad of the ridiculous. These are both physical objects and also conceptual paths for a movement into the future of equity. My work is not dystopian, but instead a visible struggle, practicing fortitude. I think about anti-establishmentarianism and disproportionate-resilience-weariness within dysfunctional systems of sociopathic power. I prefer my work to use 4 renewable forms of energy: muscle, sun, wind, and water in technological conflations. This provides a guiding formal process for me as well as a conceptual thread that links humans with each of the elements within climate conditions that continue to connect us all.”