Almshouse

April 16 – 19, 2025
Cora Stafford Gallery
University of North Texas
Denton, TX

This exhibition explores a speculative future ravaged by human induced environmental collapse. Through installation, painting, sculpture, and wearable art, Narong Tintamusik presents a desolate world where ritual, ancestral knowledge, and care serve as physical, psychological, and spiritual sustenance for a nomadic group of Thai people. The reimaginings symbolize contemporary systems like overconsumption of ultra-processed foods, waste colonialism, ecological extraction, cultural assimilation, and how we might look beyond these infrastructures of material gain to other ways of nurturing connections with ourselves and others.

The installation explores the movement of material and immaterial sustenance through abstracted bodies and landscapes. Food sculptures made from Thai food ingredients, detritus, wastewater, and acrylic paint are offered to a spirit house to bless the Thai travelers as they push forward. Spiritually possessed plastics are given similar food offerings to form a muralesque map of the land they have colonized for so long as a reward for the long overdue nutrition. Wearable art, loosely inspired by Buddha necklaces, food wrapped in banana leaves, and convenience meals, allows travelers to be on the go quickly. Aniline dyed wood paintings serve as atmospheric medical diagnostic devices to measure one’s internal health.

By envisioning a desolate future, Narong Tintamusik’s works serve as a warning and encourage us to rethink what future generations will inherit and inspire new ideas to revise our collective future for the better.