"'Shack, Commune, Compound' puts together buildings representing various spiritual and political ideologies that have separated themselves away from the rest of America - from the Aryan Nations Compound and Shaker Meeting Houses to Thoreau’s Walden and everything in between. It is a landscape splintered by ideological divisions. I scattered these dwellings onto a topography of crushed leaves mixed with contour map imagery.

Utopianism and it’s discontents has always been a theme in my work. America, with its imposition of ideology over nature, is one of the worlds great utopian experiments and this experiment is central to who we are. We may have sought to create a new Jerusalem, but it took slavery, genocide and environmental catastrophe to get us there. Our aspirations for heaven on earth lead us to a new place in hell.” - Fred Tomaselli, 2020