I Like Texas and Texas Likes Me

For three and a half weeks, Taraka Larson spent her time living in a gallery inside of the Museum of Human Acheivement in Austin and transformed it into a post-apocalyptic Garden of Eden with a seven foot long native gopher constrictor.

Inspired by the failed Biosphere 2, a series of recurring serpent nightmares, and Joseph Beuys' short stint living in a gallery with a wild coyote, Larson envisions a radical utopian living experiment where both human and snake can co-exist together in harmony. The contained space becomes like a sealed hermetic chamber of sorts, with the aim to regain pieces of lost paradise and heal the unconscious rifts within the individual and collective psyches, post-fall. 

The "garden" weaves together simulated elements of the snake's native desert habitat, as well as dream-like slices of Larson's pre-internet youth growing up in a small redneck town outside of Austin listening to punk music and learning how to play guitar. Each shred of memory contains a vague reference to a personal "paradise lost", be it Blink 182's Buddha album, a Nirvana poster, or Green Day's "Welcome to Paradise".

Part of the co-habitation process involved writing pop punk homages with the snake and tending to various herb and vegetable plants growing throughout the space. At the end of the residency, one of those songs was cut on a lathe and pressed into pizza dough as an ephemeral, edible sonic artifact, a "pizza record", made from the various plants grown inside the garden.

After the show was finished, Larson set the native gopher constrictor free to live in the wild near her childhood home.