BRANDY EVE ALLEN

SYZYGY is an ode to the land, an act of reverence, a centering on metabolic co-regulation with the ground itself—with its mineral bodies, its residues, its living and decaying matter. Just as humans co-regulate with one another, we are continually co-regulating with the environments that hold us. This site specific offering opens a space for that realignment incorporating sculpture, anthropology, light and sound installation, exploring grief, ancestor reverence, and ecological intelligence as fluid, transpersonal and transcorporeal processes. The work weaves together manual making, radical collaboration with place, and conversations across eco-feminist intelligences; invoking ritual and sonic information as ancient technologies for coregulation, (re)connection and healing. 

The term syzygy describes the alignment of three or more celestial bodies in a straight line, most often marking eclipses when the sun, moon, and Earth converge. Within the work, three rooms unfold in sequence, mirroring this celestial passage. Each space carries a distinct material and chromatic register drawn from the strata of the Salton Sea: the uppermost crust of salt, a body of clay beneath, and finally the anaerobic black silt below. Moving through them becomes a descent through layered memory, a shifting of light toward occlusion, where one body eclipses another and something new is revealed through that obscuring.

In the last room, visitors are invited to lie down within this dense black field, to listen as musical compositions come into conversation with field recordings from the Salton Sea. Here, listening becomes a porous, sensorial act of contact—vibrational, immersive, and metabolizing—where what persists beneath visibility resonates through the body.

SYZYGY is a vital act of listening and reverence for the beyond-human, in a time of avoidance and denial. Situated at the shores of an ongoing ecological crisis, the project weaves connection and intention into landscape through material gestures as acts of transmutation- through these we extend our awareness and capacities to access and understand the experience of being across difference. Acts of attention are a reconsecration. This practice is essential to redress the current breakdown in eco-social relationships and to bring hearts and minds into alignment with the truth of our present moment.

- Wanda Orme & Brandy Eve Allen

2026

The emergence of a prayer has taken form along the unstable shores of the Salton Sea, unfolding as part of the 2026 Bombay Beach Biennale. In 2025, during the Los Angeles fires, we traveled to the Salton Sea with no directive beyond listening, an orientation toward the land without agenda, allowing the conditions of the place to shape what might come through. A year later, a small grant was offered to continue that exchange and deepen an already forming conversation.

What has since emerged, SYZYGY, is a space to receive you, an environment that gathers the body into relation, where material, sound, memory, and attention begin to align. The work moves through questions of ecological instability, grief, stewardship, reciprocity, and rupture, reflecting the fragile conditions of both landscape and human relationship. The Salton Sea itself exists as a consequence of extraction, engineering, neglect, and abandonment, and those same conditions inevitably enter into the collaborative process.

SYZYGY is a space that understands how neglect born from hierarchical thinking fractures the field. It challenges the centering of the individual as primary, a prioritization that contradicts the very foundation of what sustains community, collaboration, and relational harmony. SYZYGY was created with the understanding that consistency, attention, and follow through are forms of care, and that without them, the field destabilizes into fracture and disintegration.

The work became inseparable from questions surrounding what happens when something living is brought into form but not carried forward, much like the abandonment of a child, or an ecosystem left untended beyond its thresholds. The project was shaped not only by the landscape itself, but by an erosion within collaboration, revealing how relationship can collapse when responsibility beyond initiation dissolves. This rupture impacted more than the structure of the project itself. It fractured a collaborative trust, where the sense of being met through a shared act of care and materialization stood in direct opposition to what the space was intended to hold. 

In this way, the social ecology surrounding the project began mirroring the ecological conditions of the Salton Sea itself: beauty, toxicity, fragility, residue, and the visible consequences of neglect. Lack of attention becomes a form of defacement. Rather than offering resolution, SYZYGY remains within this tension. It asks what it means to stay in relationship to something beyond the moment of inspiration, to continue tending after the initial act of creation has passed.

2025

It wasn’t the fires that forced us to go, we had this trip planned for some time. We were going to listen to the land. It wasn’t without a tinge of guilt that we were leaving behind a landscape that was screaming for care and concern to visit another that was in living decay. Transient beauty caught between memory and entropy. The tension between natural cycles and human interference, where the deceptive "calm" becomes stagnation rather than renewal. Cyanobacteria, Eutrophication, Anaerobic decomposition, Biodiversity, Evapotranspiration, Desertification. The land speaks of both science and spirit. Wanda Orme, with whom this project is a collaboration, our roles in this ecosystem differed. Wanda gently embraced the land, unafraid of the sedimentation, the hydrogen sulfide, the arsenic, the “black goo”. She accepted the land in all of it’s truths, the death of life did not turn her away as she held it in her hand, cuddling the mud pots, and rejecting the toxic reputation this place had acquired. I on the other hand was more apprehensive in my approach, maybe it was intuitive. Things that are not toxic can still cause harm, I needed to understand before getting my hands dirty. I’m still learning. The land is a being, we are getting to know. We deepen our relationship as we listen more intently, we dig deep both literally and metaphorically, uncovering the layers of identity. Salt crust, algae, black goo, dirt, mud, clay, and far beyond, magma. A paradox of surface beauty and deep, volatile truth.

The sculpture below was created at the Salton Sea using found materials: feathers from a bird embedded in the sand, driftwood from the playa, obsidian shards, and string. Suspended in space, the work engages directly with the wind, each breeze sets the obsidian into motion, their collisions producing delicate sounds while slowly chipping away at one another. The piece becomes a living conversation between material and environment: a sonic and visual reminder of impermanence, where creation and disintegration coexist. By listening to its song as it erodes, the work invites reflection on fragility, transformation, and the entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds.

 Poem for a Fire

A crackle in the sky sparks the Earth. Could be the big bang, but it’s 13.8 billion years later. 
The Earth is dehydrated, fertile ground for a fire. 
A flamelet is born in the hills, but is quickly spotted by humans and extinguished. 
All is well, on the surface. 
But deep within, the embers remain. 
Smoldering in the soil, slowly traveling through living roots and organic material from decomposed plant matter. 
Life and death nourish it’s six day journey. 
Far from home, a crack of light carries the call of the wind. 
The embers are listening as the calls increase. 
A hundred miles per hour. 
Ignition. 
Vegetation becomes its next source of sustenance, fuel for high combustion. 
Form, process, dispersal, GO, or the other way around. 
Either way, the embers have arrived. 
A fire isn’t born, it is the realized iteration of a spark, all grown up. 
Increasing. 
Mistakenly unpredictable, it does what it’s told, a loyalist to the call. 
Where very little can escape. 
Love is a fire, suffocate it put it out, give it space to breathe. 
But this breath is destructive when combined forces are at play. 
The wind and fire innocently fall in love, and the land is covered in red. 
The cars are laced with ash, invisible chemicals penetrate the air. 
Collision, a memory, this happened before, remember Maui? 
Remember before. 
They don’t want us to remember. 
But we refuse to forget. 
A cultural burning, we alchemize, a controlled burning. 
A prescription for the future. 
Fire as medicine.