"Comora Tolliver's "Pod" is an installation about seed banks. Many countries store their seeds in banks so that the genomes won't cease to exist if there is a war or a natural disaster. Corporations such as Monsanto have made it almost impossible to rely on age-old methods of saving seeds, having copyrighted the genomes of plants such as soy. Tolliver's work shows how all beings exist together in a space that is itself a product of their existance. Tolliver lines her installation space with highly reflective. artificial-looking Mylar: its folds and creases induce a hypnotic intensity, the visual equivalent of a wall of guitar feedback. In the center is an egglike structure, also coated with Mylar, inside which is a gravelike space that contains dead flowers in a pool of water. This is dark ecology, indeed. Photographs of paint oozing down the mirror like Mylar disturb our sense of foreground and background. The trails of paint look almost three-dimensional, as if they are tendrils that grow downward from above the photo frame, some distance in front of the Mylars surface. Rather than resolving our disorientation, Tolliver's work heightens our sense of how the ecological crisis has disrupted our normative sense of foreground and background."

By Timothy Morton, THE ECOLOGICAL THOUGHT , chapter 3 "Forward Thinking", page 109-110