MONUMENTS OF BARBARISM
April - May , 2022
A continuation of the Power work from 2021, this installation is in Los Angeles adjacent to the DWP. The work again attempts to address issues embedded in institutionalized power systems, using the most ubiquitous symbol of utility commonly referred to as Power that just happens to also be one of the most recognizable symbols of Christianity, itself a form of institutional Power. Employing sound and smell to bring what is comfortably benign and invisible on the outside into the private space and forcing consideration of the roll it plays in culture. The work performed primarily in isolation due to the inherent danger of active "live" wires and is only viewed historically through the ultimate form of control, photographs and video. Viewing through a wide lens of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Marxs' Base/Superstructure or T. Adorno's Minima Moralia, from which the name is derived, it ultimately takes aim at the role that monumental technology plays in enabling and even promoting civic barbarism through hidden in plain site systems.
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MONUMENTS OF BARBARISM
April - May , 2022
A continuation of the Power work from 2021, this installation is in Los Angeles adjacent to the DWP. The work again attempts to address issues embedded in institutionalized power systems, using the most ubiquitous symbol of utility commonly referred to as Power that just happens to also be one of the most recognizable symbols of Christianity, itself a form of institutional Power. Employing sound and smell to bring what is comfortably benign and invisible on the outside into the private space and forcing consideration of the roll it plays in culture. The work performed primarily in isolation due to the inherent danger of active "live" wires and is only viewed historically through the ultimate form of control, photographs and video. Viewing through a wide lens of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Marxs' Base/Superstructure or T. Adorno's Minima Moralia, from which the name is derived, it ultimately takes aim at the role that monumental technology plays in enabling and even promoting civic barbarism through hidden in plain site systems.
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Power
April 14 -21, 2021
This is an action work that took place in a house that was built in 1922 in southern Oregon. It would have received a basic single phase electrical service in the 1930s, consisting of two electrical outlets and a single light bulb and socket. It was built on land originally inhabited by Native American Takeelma before the colony, and it operated as an auto camp and Shell gas station until 1934.
Forces consideration of the historical intersection between native American and colonizing and western totems of worship as well as questions of domain, ownership, environment, and the access to both public vs private spaces. The work uses ubiquitous symbols of industrial and technological "monuments", past and present, that exist in the public sphere and have been used in the continued creation and control of culture and class by those with power.
INTERSECTION
Forced reflections of the Invisible Intersections between machine and nature.