Behind These Strange Sensations are Hidden Structures
Tracing lines of a muddled network, Behind These Strange Sensations are Hidden Structures is a body of work that considers the forces, sensations, and powers that link bodies (both human and non-human) to each other and to the architectural and political structures that surround them. This is approached from looking at material realities (the actualization of political ideologies in the shapes of cities and structures) and through the virtual (the intensities that affect and motivate our movements and desires). This work turns to the jarring intensities that pull away from monotony and in doings so provides the tools to imagine alternatives to hegemonic realities.
Bad Circuit
Cement All®, Proflex dryer duct, Infiti emblem, blue electrical cables, Home Depot Bucket, Norcent TV Monitor, Yellow extension cords
A video plays on loop on an old model flat screen that rests on the floor against an Orange Home Depot Bucket. A flexible metal conduit comes out of the bucket, wrapping around the screen, partially filled with cement. Miscellaneous objects such as blue cables and a car emblem are set into the concrete. While cement typically signifies the sleek sturdiness of modernity, this ambiguous yet architectural object reveals cement as viscous and malleable. In highlighting the cement in this deliquescent state, this object brings to mind other structures that present themselves as natural and unmoveable.
On screen, two figures bleed into a background of slimy images of grocery stores, body parts, shopping malls, and peculiar scenes—they have found themselves in a mess. Some of these images were found drifting online, others are snapshots of found moments taken on a phone camera in a knee-jerk-reaction. These images, reinflated and abstracted in cinema 4D, capture ruptive or jarring events: moments that at a glance might cause their viewer to fall out of their serial rhythm or question the realness of a given situation. These images are a disruption of flow, allowing for the potential to destabilize the neutrality of these presented structures and conventions.
For five minutes of viewing, please begin video at 2:14
In the final frame, one figure says to the other, “I am leaking, so are you.” The other replies, “oh what a mess we’ve made.” This moment speaks to the figures’ realization of their own intersubjectivity: they are intertwined in a network of people, objects, architecture, social hegemonies, economies and political structures. At this point in the video, these once alienated characters who had stood in a barren landscape, become enclosed by their sticky surroundings, finding themselves the conductors of intensity, action, and affect.
Underlying Principal
Corner beads, vent, inkjet t-shirt transfers, temporary tattoos, tiles, latex gloves dipped in bioplastic, electronic air cleaner cel
Drilled into a wall is Underlying Principal, a skeletal form that resembles scaffolding made out of corner beads (metal brackets that protect the corners of drywall). Scaffolding problematizes the idea of buildings as autonomous structures that do not rely on the support of others.
Buildings under construction are illuminating because without their surfaces they reveal the transient nature of the city space: a landscape that can change and continues to. This object I have made is what a structure turned inside out might look like. Unlike a finished building whose formal properties would “hide and obscure it exactly by offering a front, a skin, a first degree depth of comprehension,” this object discloses its inner structure in a backwards and convoluted way with the mistreated material. What is exposed is a system that does not quite add up. The corner beads are flimsy when misused and behave nothing like scaffolding but the silhouette of the form suggests otherwise. The conflation of these two building apparatuses dissolves the barrier between internal and external space.
There is a stickiness and liveliness to affect as it flows around, adhering itself to bodies and objects. The language used to describe it often shares a similar quality: as I read about affect, it clings and lingers in my thoughts, slowly unraveling meaning and affect itself. Images I have collected and altered are printed onto Inkjet t-shirt transfers and isolated becoming a delicate, heat-sensitive material. On screen in Bad Circuit, these textures are lively and viscous but here they drape over the scaffolding like dead remains.
Scaffolding is very close to perception itself — the moment we see it, we separate it from the building and then we contextualise it and reconnect it to the building. And we do that in order to keep a clear distinction in our heads between building and support. Reading the scaffolding as temporary — which is one way of trying to undercut it — goes back to the fantasy of the object as freestanding. What the scaffolding does is unconsciously remind us of the muddle of the world, which we do not like to think of; what we are trying to preserve is the ideological, the ideal.
Mark Cousins in an interview with Celine Condorelli, 2010
It Takes 3
Cement All®, Proflex dryer duct, deflated bike tire, unidentified metal brackets, flexible metal conduct, canvas work glove
A cement-filled-duct object is held up by two unidentified brackets and a tire. Each component relies on the other two for the object to stand on its own. To find this balance, this work requires three sets of hands to assemble. It Takes 3 is an exercise in support and intention. This work contains materials and objects that make up the ordinary spaces we frequent. In foregrounding mundane objects and materials, this work imagines alternative realities of familiar spaces. It is not a recontextualization of these elements but rather, an extraction of existing intensities from these objects that might be overlooked by abstracting and reorganizing. The materials together become abstracted while new objects emerge: a crib, a walker, a dog, ect.
Images taken by Mike Gontmakher