Gravity Jokes at Hedreen Gallery, Seattle University, Seattle, WA – Sept. 8 – Nov. 17, 2018

curated by Molly Mac.

This recent body of work was produced during my residency at Recology Cleanscapes. What is made visible here is a trace of Seattle’s “progress”, siting the seemingly perpetual cycle of modern manifest destiny, where the real cost of hyper-consumerist excess is infused in the smell of Puget Sound’s summer heat.

“Scavenged and salvaged from mounds of trash and recyclables, materials used in these works range from a muddy spectrum of green, gray and taupe paints leftover from various institutional facilities, and other industrial materials including Styrofoam, plastic sheeting, household refuse and discarded safety gear.

In skin(scapes): 8-15, 8 thin, latex-enamel paint “peels” appear to slink slowly off their rectangular fasteners, apparently failing to live up to their own, seemingly self-imposed, grids. These works flutter delicately as viewers walk by. In these skin(scapes), gravity is a kind of grammar, and this grammar is torn between service to a language of figurative representation and service to languages of modern/postmodern abstraction. The joke could go either way, or perhaps somewhere else entirely.” – Molly Mac

gravity jokes_exhibition layout

Typology of Absence – 2018 Recology Artist-in-Residence Exhibition, Seattle, WA

They’ve been gutted of their meaning. They exist for the other.
Their bodies were for others, and their skin made to endure.

We don’t know what they once held or held onto. All that remains is a trace of a foregone presence, an empty space filled with the weight of absence.

There, in that in-between space, through the cracks, a potential for selfhood emerges, negotiating remnant objecthood with pronounced subjectivity.

They are artifacts, reminders for renewal, forever archiving dusts of the present.

“…more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible. And it is this, in fact, which makes it a miraculous substance: a miracle is always a sudden transformation of nature. Plastic remains impregnated throughout with this wonder: it is less a thing than the trace of a movement.”

-Roland Barthes, Mythologies

From our toiletries and sex toys to house paint, plastic has become the most prevalent surface layer of our daily lives, since Barthes’ foretelling essay on plastic published only half a century ago.

Most of the paints commercially produced and available to us today are made of plastic/synthetic polymers in terms of the chemical composition of binders and pigments used. This show, Plastisphere Earthlings, is Part II of my on-going project in the teleological exploration of paint, its plastic nature, and its relation to nature. Expanding from and further developing my earlier work based on queer theory and construction of identities through paint-made objects, this new body of work both metaphorically and physically confronts and juxtaposes the synthetic, plastic, and artificial nature of paint with vegetation. Introduction of this “natural” element momentarily disrupts the sterile, colorful, and shiny surface of plastic paint, providing a peculiar sense of wonder and resilience, much like seeing grass growing between cracks in concrete pavement. It shows us how much and how far we have come to change the environment and how we perceive that change, how quickly and easily we accept it or deny it as nature or being natural.

In illuminating this anomalous yet anticipated emergence of the anthropogenic substrate called the Plastisphere, symbols and codes found in road constructions are used to serve as a metaphor for our ever-so quickly changing environment. In the interest of animating and re-imagining plastic as the non-filial queer progeny of our love and desire for a sleeker, cleaner, and a more perfect world, I would like to present these paint-made, blobby, plastic objects as our fellow earthlings, traversing this artifactual earth that we share with other living things.

In the closing statement of her lecture titled, “the Queer Futurity of Plastic”, Heather Davis suggests: “…to acknowledge that the future will be queer, in terms of being completely disruptive, and also in the sense of learning from queer folks, who have never assumed biological reproduction or even continuance as a kind of possibility of hope, that futurity has to be completely reconfigured means finding a way to live with toxicity, extinction, and without the reassurance of an open horizon of the future. Toxicity provides a re-solution to the question of what to do with ambivalence of queerness only to the extent that does not represent a choice. It is already here; it is not a matter of queer political agency so much as to queer political state of the present.”Plastisphere Earthlings, Dakota Gallery, Bellingham, WA