Emilie Trice’s Millennial Pink is a site-specific installation with a VR 360 video that addresses climate change, as manifested by wildfire season, and social media’s spectacle economy, specifically evident in the Instagram phenomenon.
The work is inspired by Phos-Chek, the hot pink fire retardant used to both extinguish wildfires and re-fertilize the burn zone, and set against a “perfect shot” backdrop of interior design that mirrors the Instagram trend known as “millennial pink.” In this context, however, “millennial pink” refers instead to the hot pink Phos-Chek material that can be seen covering entire city blocks and suburban homes following wildfire outbreaks in residential areas, creating a surreal landscape that is both beautiful and disturbing. Phos-Chek is being used more and more often because wildfire season grows longer and deadlier every year. Last year’s wildfires in Australia, The Congo, Siberia, The Amazon and, of course, California (currently) are tragic examples of a global wildfire season gone berserk. Images of the blazes and their paths of destruction flooded social media, before a new fire would break out and collective attention would shift, once again.
The VR video transports the viewer to a futuristic landscape of hot pink mountainous desolation, wherein they meet a eco-feminist warrior who promptly “extinguishes” them. The video was shot on location at a burn site in Colorado that suffered massive wildfires over ten years ago. Sadly, the landscape has yet to recover...and yet, there is kind of beauty in the wreckage, and in the promise of rebirth. Millennial Pink thus confronts the spectator with the helplessness of their own limitations and a glimpse at our potential destiny, in both the virtual landscape and our shared, natural environment.
Emilie Trice, Millennial Pink, trailer of the VR 360 video, 2019
Emilie Trice (b. 1982) is a new media artist currently based in Colorado. As both an artist and as a curator, Emilie specializes in large-scale installations in alternative venues that incorporate emerging technologies like VR and projection mapping in order to create immersive experiences. Her artwork addresses toxic patriarchal structures through an eco-feminist lens, which essentially equates the domination (and widespread destruction) of nature’s ecosystem to the suppression of womxn and the feminine. In that sense, all her work is political, but the edges are burnished by humor, irony and aesthetics. This allows her to critique social and climate injustices without succumbing to nihilism, at least in the Nieztschean sense.
Emilie graduated magna cum laude from Middlebury College in Vermont with a joint degree in German philosophy and art. She is currently working towards her masters degree in Emergent Digital Practices at the University of Denver. Her art has been exhibited at the Aspen Art Museum, in Miami, Berlin, and in Denver at Redline and Leon Gallery. Emilie is also a writer and has been published by The New York Times, The Paris Review, Artforum and The Brooklyn Academy of Music, among others. She’s part of a team that curates the IG handle @art.
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