Synthetic Totems set — totemdongbay

Synthetic Totems

ONGOING BODY OF WORK / INSTALLATIONS / 2023—

Synthetic Totems examines how contemporary civilization generates new systems of faith through material culture. Industrial objects become potential totems, mediating relationships between humans, space, and the environments they inhabit.

Rooted in field research across urban infrastructures, industrial landscapes, and everyday functional systems, the project reconfigures organic materials, architectural components, and manufactured artifacts into sculptural assemblies. Through these constructions, ritual, attachment, and symbolic meaning emerge from the operational structures of contemporary life.

Each work exists as both an individual sculpture and a fragment within a larger research framework, proposing that faith is continually formed through the objects we maintain, the systems we depend upon, and the environments we collectively construct.

Edge Effects / University of Wisconsin–Madison / 2025

SELECTED WORKS

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