BIN 11, 2019

Exhibited in RR3 2019 at Black Contemporary (Ames, IA; 2019)

16 weeks | with Jacob Murphy + Wentao Zhong | under Pete Goché

Explorations into the spatial capacity of an agricultural seed-drying bin.

What is the capacity of material adjacencies to produce a spatial experience of strangeness, seduction, entrancement, fixation, and wonder? How can banal materials, specific to a particular political and cultural setting, be registered, recognized, and repurposed for the process of making strange possibly familiar—or unfamiliar—spaces and practices? How does the physical presence of the body interacting with the adjacencies reveal new possibilities and understandings?

The space of Black Contemporary was, and is, one of labor: agricultural labor to architectural labor. Both processes result in a material transformation, creating this change through altering the physical properties of the materials in the former, and assembling many disparate materials to form a larger whole in the case of the latter. Our spatial construction sought to appropriate both these logics, highlighting the capacity for wonder within unexpected material and spatial arrangements.

272,850 feet of Zebco OmniFlex fishing line occupied this space of labor. The line was unrolled in a long, tedious, yet meditative action from 186 rolls, reflecting the rhythmic practices of agriculture, a continuous repetition of yearly tasks. This agglomeration, when placed adjacent to a source of light, held an unexpected capacity to create wonder, as seductive as it was strange.

Over time, the material begins to register in different ways, at first maybe only phenomological, but later existential, and hopefully further, metaphysical. Contemplation is not demanded, not even interaction, only presence, but increasing the level of engagement only serves to deepen an awareness of this strangeness, activating new adjacencies and providing space for meditative observation. The chosen methods and materials hold particular interest for their unique properties. Some more technical, some more conceptual, the particular associations and historical connotations of the individual components fade from immediacy, letting the affect register to create a point of departure for engagement.

This capacity for wonder, and the effect that generates it, must be directly and personally observed for the total essence to be understood. What follows is meant to illustrate the dynamic through the static, but because of the nature of the material, and its seeming immaterialness, any traditional methods of representation or reproduction fail it.

A 468-page project book and film was produced to accompany the exhibition of this work.