Entry 33 - Silent Spring, by Ansel Oommen

Silent Spring by Ansel Oommen

Ansel Oommen, MLS(ASCP) is an urban naturalist, medical technologist, and a horticultural therapist-in-training. He often metabolizes the natural and clinical sciences as substrates for the arts and vice versa, and is equally at home in a hospital, laboratory, studio, or garden.

This collage features a common laboratory item, the biohazard label, as a way to tie elements of public health, mental health, and ecology together. After a rough shift, I like to visit the parks to get away from the madness. Yet, as I walk the barren streets and eerily quiet green spaces, I am often reminded of Rachel Carson and her Silent Spring but instead of the presence of pesticides, it is the absence of people that is most deafening.