Last Sequoia on Earth

Last Sequoia on Earth is an immersive audiovisual experience created as a collaboration between an audio and visual artist that acts as both a sorrowful mourning of environmental collapse and a meditative celebration of nature’s beauty.

Last Sequoia on Earth addresses and mourns the weighty reality of environmental collapse, while simultaneously presenting a space for viewers to escape that same reality. Created via call and response between an audio and visual artist, this work embodies both isolation through individual process and connection through collaboration. Incorporating the aleatoric quality of improvised electronic music, natural and man-made three-dimensional sculptural elements interrupt and interact with footage of nature and ink manipulation. This immersive installation invites the viewer to physically step out of a familiar environment into one both sorrowful and soothing, connective and disruptive, heavy and buoyant.

Kerry St. Laurent is a visual artist from Western Massachusetts who lingers in the spaces between realism and abstraction, chaos and meticulous detail. Life-curious and death-casual, her mixed-media work references nature, mapping, microbiology, fractals, architecture and memory, deconstructing the subjective lens and presenting impermanence as the grand unifier. She has recently focused on response work and collaboration with artists of different mediums, specifically writers and musicians. Kerry received her BFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2004), and her MFA from the University of Hartford (2006), both with a concentration in painting, and she completed her EdD with a concentration in higher and postsecondary education in 2017. Her work has been exhibited locally and nationally and she has served as Artist-in-Residence at Hot Springs and Isle Royale National Parks. She teaches 2D methods as a visual arts faculty member at Western New England University.

Adam Michael Kozak is a musician and sound artist currently residing in Sunderland, MA. A working artist since 2001, Kozak has worked within genres as disparate as lullabies, doom metal, video game music, plunderphonic sound collage, and everything in between. Since 2018 he has released numerous albums under the moniker Burial Grid and worked with the labels Crucial Blast and Werra Foxma Records. This latest project focuses heavily on anxiety, bodily degradation/transcendence, grief, and the intersection of all three. His palette of choice includes synthesizers of all stripes, found sounds, low-quality acoustic instruments, and a predilection for emphasizing imperfection through the use of dictaphones, old cell phones, and reel-to-reel tape machines.