Permissible Dose includes blown glass, salvaged 2x4s, a five gallon Steelers™️ bucket, found cinder blocks and former pieces of Pittsburgh foundations, a tree stump and branch from an overgrown hillside that was once a coal mine, coal, coke, pine, concrete casts of rocks, actual rocks, lab clamps, rebar, stoneware, more concrete, a melting rock cast in beeswax, scavenged asphalt and tar, warning lights that are always on, knotweed and rattan-reed sticks, Pittsburgh-industry inspired fragrances, and a scent diffuser controlled by a motor and custom software that diffuses eggy, sulfuric wafts based on a real time Air Quality Index reading near US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works.
Photos by Jacob Koestler at the Sculpture Center
Permissible Dose, 2023
Permissible Dose investigates visual, auditory, and olfactory experiences of living in proximity to industrial pollution. Referencing the common “rotten egg” smell of hydrogen sulfide emissions in Pittsburgh, PA, the installation includes a diffuser that mists a fragrance made from over-cooked hard-boiled eggs triggered by the real-time Air Quality Index reading from a sensor near US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works.
The Pittsburgh metropolitan area is consistently ranked among the top 10 most-polluted regions in the United States based on measurements of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the air. Corporate polluters regularly pay millions of dollars in fines rather than meet air quality regulations or modernize old facilities. The region’s recently constructed Shell ethylene cracker plant, now the state’s second-biggest emitter of VOCs, released 95% of its annual emissions allowances in a single month before it began official operations in 2022. Fence-line communities have long been treated as an acceptable sacrifice and experience disproportionately high rates of asthma, cancer, and heart disease. Polluters instrumentalize feelings of hope and nostalgia to buy the support of declining industry towns, making promises of investment into local communities that are often exaggerated, broken or short lived. Facilities are run into the ground and abandoned while industry executives invest in “right-to-work” states downriver.
Developed from conversations with grassroots activists and watchdogs monitoring Pittsburgh-area industrial sites, the work is a meditation on contemporary compulsory risk and concealed responsibility. Permissible Dose explores the body as sensor, alarm, and site of chemical and environmental entanglements and porousness.
This project was supported in part by funding from the Carnegie Mellon University Frank-Ratchye Further Fund.
Photos by Jacob Koestler at the Sculpture Center.
✰ Related Press ✰
Grassroots Science Fuels Air-Quality Revelations, Ambridge Connection, March 2023
