Fume 2025
3 Purple Air Flex Monitors, Merv 13 Filters, Voltaic Systems Solar Panel System
2024 Mohn LAND grantee Carlos Agredano’s Fume is a nomadic sculpture that monitors and collects ambient air quality data as it roams, creating hyper-local information about environmental impact to freeway-adjacent communities in Los Angeles.
The sculpture, mounted to a trailer and attached to the artist’s truck, will visit thirteen freeway-adjacent public sites throughout a three-month period to collect air quality samples. The sculpture will be open to the public during one-day long installations at public parks and open areas that border these freeways, during which Agredano will organize conversations and activations with other artists who have a personal relationship to the nearby communities.
Fume furthers Agredano’s ongoing interest in air quality relative to the communities it affects the most, and in the ramifications of urban planning that has unequally distributed environmental pollution across the region. The artist offers a blueprint in imagining a future that centers scientific methods, and environmentally focused creating and thinking. His investigations point out the irony of urban planning initiatives, which are often steeped in utopian ideals yet ultimately destructive in their results. Loosely inspired by Senga Nengudi’s 1978 performance Ceremony for Freeway Fets, Agredano’s project similarly adopts Nengudi’s community-building ethos and desire to draw attention to the ubiquitous but under-considered aspects of the urban landscape.
The sculpture’s form draws from the motifs of Googie architecture, as well as the industrial design of the freeways themselves. Specifically, Agredano’s sculpture references the Theme Building at LAX, designed by Pereira & Luckman in 1959. Three air quality monitors will reside within an aluminum enclosure that mimics the design of the breeze blocks that circle the Theme Building. Agredano has also invited the artists participating in the project to contribute to the sculpture throughout its run by adding their own work to the bed of the truck and atop the trailer platform.
In addition to the air sensing equipment powered by solar array, the sculpture will incorporate an EPA air quality flag, the color of which will correspond to the air quality of each site (Agredano installs these flags at every site where his work is exhibited as part of an ongoing project).
3 Purple Air Flex Monitors, Merv 13 Filters, Voltaic Systems Solar Panel System
2024 Mohn LAND grantee Carlos Agredano’s Fume is a nomadic sculpture that monitors and collects ambient air quality data as it roams, creating hyper-local information about environmental impact to freeway-adjacent communities in Los Angeles.
The sculpture, mounted to a trailer and attached to the artist’s truck, will visit thirteen freeway-adjacent public sites throughout a three-month period to collect air quality samples. The sculpture will be open to the public during one-day long installations at public parks and open areas that border these freeways, during which Agredano will organize conversations and activations with other artists who have a personal relationship to the nearby communities.
Fume furthers Agredano’s ongoing interest in air quality relative to the communities it affects the most, and in the ramifications of urban planning that has unequally distributed environmental pollution across the region. The artist offers a blueprint in imagining a future that centers scientific methods, and environmentally focused creating and thinking. His investigations point out the irony of urban planning initiatives, which are often steeped in utopian ideals yet ultimately destructive in their results. Loosely inspired by Senga Nengudi’s 1978 performance Ceremony for Freeway Fets, Agredano’s project similarly adopts Nengudi’s community-building ethos and desire to draw attention to the ubiquitous but under-considered aspects of the urban landscape.
The sculpture’s form draws from the motifs of Googie architecture, as well as the industrial design of the freeways themselves. Specifically, Agredano’s sculpture references the Theme Building at LAX, designed by Pereira & Luckman in 1959. Three air quality monitors will reside within an aluminum enclosure that mimics the design of the breeze blocks that circle the Theme Building. Agredano has also invited the artists participating in the project to contribute to the sculpture throughout its run by adding their own work to the bed of the truck and atop the trailer platform.
In addition to the air sensing equipment powered by solar array, the sculpture will incorporate an EPA air quality flag, the color of which will correspond to the air quality of each site (Agredano installs these flags at every site where his work is exhibited as part of an ongoing project).