Apogaea 2025: Effigy, Temple, and BIG MONEY Art Grant Announcements

Posted On: January 23, 2025

Your CATS team is super excited to announce the Effigy, Temple, and Big Money Art Grant recipients for APOGAEA 2025: DISCO DYSTOPIA!

APOGAEA 2025 EFFIGY:
Catherine the Scorpion

Evan Beloni

The general concept is to build a telehandler into a scorpion by adding legs and body to the frame of the machine. The connection to the scorpion is the boom as a tail and a personnel basket as the venom pod, elevating participants above the ground, having a phenomenal view of the event.

APOGAEA 2025 TEMPLE:
W.H.O.O.

Mitch Giraffe, KT Rex & Beck Hargrove

W.H.O.O. is a standalone sculpture, eventually to be placed in deep playa at Burning Man. It consists of a 10 foot tall steel owl made from scrap metal, with two free-standing 4'x8' steel panels surrounding it in a square.

2025 Noodle Grant
Circle Flirt

Matthieu Lafontaine

Step up and give it a spin. You'll never see the same dance twice.... or will you…

Purrfect

G Cody Day

Purrfect is a multimedia experiential art installation that explores the healing, mesmerizing and sometimes psychedelic properties of sound and vibration through reverse engineered audio synthesis and the subharmonic translation of the frequencies of deconstructed layers of a cats purr. It's Purrfect.

Casa Fauxnita

TJ Rivers, Olivia Wolf, Zane Claes, Julie Claes

A pink wooden castle tower lights up as a radiant beacon, a playful parody of a certain Coloradan relic—but utterly reimagined into something wholly unique of a dystopian future era. The castle will have decrepit textures and fake, creative foliage spilling from windows for a solar punk vibe.

Infinity

Ilya Kushnir

Infinity is a full body transformative visual experience. Extending and multiplying the self. Overpowering your senses and entering an all encompassing space that is created uniquely by your presence.

Corpse Flower

KT Rex & Beck Hargrove

Death is part of life. Death has shaped who I am and its vines have spread through my cells. This piece continues to celebrate the beauty of death in life. This will be the final piece of our carnivorous plant garden.

Drums, Fire, Lights!

April Vapril

Fire leaping at the sound of a drum while a disco ball reflects the sparkle of Apogaea – that is the goal of this interactive fire art display, a trailer mounted platform participants can play on two drums that musically control both flame bursts from towers and flash red and blue spotlights on the rotating disco ball.

Slime Court!

Fenton Streisand & Mike Lustig,
Slimettornies at Law

“I’ll see YOU in Slime Court!”

The phrase all of Apogaea dreads. As they read the pink copy of the quadruplicate paperwork, faces ashen, they quiver with fear and trepidation. Their time in court is nigh.

String Theory 2.0

Precious

Interactive wormholes that citizens open and close with their hand or dance about as it emits from their third eye. A piece of spinning string and some blinky lights.

Garden of the Wads

Adam Keeton

An interactive alien garden featuring animatronics and LED animations. The Garden is large enough for multiple participants to explore, builds on past work, and is part of an evolving series.