Set in rural Vermont, The Neighbors is a multimedia video installation about the non-human inhabitants of the lands around the artist’s home. After living in San Francisco, California, for two decades, Sollars moved to Vermont in the fall of 2024. To get to know his new home and neighbors, he has spent the past two years interacting with his surroundings through slow listening and observation, learning them spatially and temporally. This intentional gathering of information has taken the form of diaristic snapshots taken throughout the seasons, field recordings, the collection of discarded nests and materials, and the placement of wildlife cameras in the open woodland edges of his home, which neighbors a land trust, a national forest, and the Appalachian Trail.

The installation centers on a 4-channel video featuring the four seasons, captured through multiple wildlife cameras. Editing progresses sequentially through the annual seasonal cycle, each season presenting each species' patterns as they emerge. The video is displayed on four 65” screens placed on the ground. Maple and birch log stumps act as seats for viewers to rotate in the 360º installation. Photographs, snapshots, and camera stills fill the walls, looking at traces and locations. Field-recording audio sculptures interlude the video soundtrack: Pseudacris crucifer, birds, maybe owls, and the ticking of a clock made of ticks pulled from humans and dogs. A collection of bird nests rests on shipping boxes labeled with species ID, nest type, habitat, and substrate. A site-survey location marker engraved with What’s At Stake? sits in the space with an audio recorder for visitors to add to the loop. A sole vestige of human presence appears in John Deere, a sculpture made out of found objects, including a hunting vest and plastic deer antlers.

For Sollars, to know the now is a way to understand the past and the future. Through observation, gathering, editing, and juxtaposition, Sollars is composing a personal perception of the site he occupies in the present, to be expanded upon in research and conversations with colleagues and those who have lived in this land before him.