The project, Particular Motions & Traced Fissures, was a multi-media interactive installation and intervention that investigated fragility, fragmentation, and interconnectedness as characteristics of ourselves, knowledge and surroundings, that might help us navigate new possibilities in a highly constructed (in)tangible world. The project involved partially sanding away one wall of a decayed building in a derelict neighborhood and re-inventing the narrow space between that wall and the next building. Dust particles from the erosion of the wall accumulated throughout the space, indexing the tracks of viewers. Sound and video also evinced the sanding process. Debris and salvaged materials from the neighborhood were re-worked into ephemeral and interactive sculptures, video installations, and drawings. I accumulated and presented detritus, fragments of buildings, deconstructed cobwebs, erased and re-interpreted texts, and other materials whose crumbled surfaces and compromised structures revealed their physical histories, proposed their intangible value, and re-contextualized their meanings.
The exhibition took the form of a refused and neglected archive and a demolition site where literal fissures were traced through previously defined boundaries. The material detritus and the logic of decaying structures acted as analogues for mental and social experience, using refused materials and erosive processes to open a field of metaphors in opposition to the language of architecture, structure, systems, and permanence.
Theorizing the nature of dust, particles, and traces is an essential aspect of my on-going project. I explore conditions of transition and contradiction embodied in distilled forms of matter that are simultaneously trace and building block, history and origin, memory and presence; they are elemental forms in motion between loss and possibility, or specificity and universality. The dynamic of this impossibility equates with both melancholia and optimism, and implies an illegible, tangible silence accumulating and becoming toward a new articulation.
